


The Infernal Princess Diaries

by Steerpike13713



Series: Morningstar Family Values [7]
Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018), Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Cat Furniture, Cats, Christmas, Conspiracy Theories, Drabble Collection, Episode: s02e14 Candy Morningstar, Episode: s02e16 God Johnson, Family Bonding, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Karaoke, Musicals, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Stalking, Tribe Night (Lucifer TV), Underage Drinking, Yule, attempts to prevent underage drinking, those don't go so well
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-23
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:27:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 28,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21913663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Steerpike13713/pseuds/Steerpike13713
Summary: A series of short stories set in the Morningstar Family Values universe, in no particular order, dealing with Sabrina's time in LA with Lucifer, her return to Greendale, and how the Morningstar-Spellman extended family deals with things going forward.
Relationships: Chloe Decker/Lucifer Morningstar, Lucifer Morningstar (Lucifer TV) & Sabrina Spellman
Series: Morningstar Family Values [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1561111
Comments: 288
Kudos: 794





	1. In Which Sabrina Does Not Meet Her Grandfather

**Author's Note:**

> My readers may have noticed a change in title.  
> I recently received a very entertaining flame which accused me of turning the plot of Sabrina and Lucifer into 'the infernal Princess Diaries', and I liked the title so much I knew I had to use it somewhere, and the original title was never one I liked all that much anyway.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Being an account of how getting committed to Westridge is a rather more complicated business when one has custody of a teenage Antichrist.

Chloe first found out about the psychiatric hold plan when Lucifer turned up at her door with a sulky sixteen-year-old in tow and informed her that he needed someone to look after his kid. 

She really,  _ really  _ wished she could say it was the most outrageous request he’d ever made of her.

“What- Lucifer, what are you-” Chloe shook her head, and opened the door a little wider to let them in. “You know this is exactly the sort of thing I was complaining about during that first case after you got back, right? You can’t just...just drop your kid on someone else and jet off to do...whatever it is you’re planning…”

“Checking myself into the first open room at Westridge?” Lucifer supplied, wearing an expression of such profound smugness that Chloe wanted to shake him for a moment before she processed the rest of the sentence.

“Wait...Westbridge...as in the psychiatric hospital we were at today? Why would you-”

Sabrina rolled her eyes, putting down the large black cat-carrier she’d brought in with her. “Because  _ Dad  _ wants to find out why that one mental patient knew his original name, and didn’t stop to think about what happens if they try to commit him permanently!”

That was...actually a pretty good point, all things considered. Chloe had got used to dismissing the things Lucifer said as just...affectations. He was rich and eccentric and if he wanted to claim to be Satan on Earth, it didn’t seem to be hurting anyone and he was, after all, in therapy. Possibly not enough therapy for his many, many emotional issues, but Linda was doing her best. But if anyone had told Chloe a year or two ago that a man who believed he was the Devil was checking himself into a psychiatric hospital, she’d probably have said it was the best place for him.

Then the rest of that sentence caught up with her.

“Wait...your...he knew you before…” she made a vague gesture that encompassed Lucifer’s general...Lucifer-ness…

Lucifer’s expression had gone from smug to shifty. “...I...have reason to believe so. Much as I hate to admit it, Mr Johnson might  _ actually  _ be my father after all.”

That was a whole new layer of weird that needed unpacked.

“...he  _ might  _ be?” Chloe repeated. “Wouldn’t you know? If he’s your dad...I mean, you’d recognise him, wouldn’t you?”

“Not necessarily. My father’s always liked playing shell games with his identity.” The look on Lucifer’s face was haunted, for a moment, before it smoothed out into its familiar wicked grin. “Anyway, you were the one who said it would be difficult to interview God Johnson. Having an inside man could be quite effective in closing this case…”

Chloe groped for something that made sense, and found something that felt like a handhold. “...so you’re doing this to help the case.”

“Yes!” Lucifer said triumphantly, and then corrected himself hastily when Sabrina trod on his foot. “Among other things. Which is why I need you to watch my spawn for me.”

None of this had been in the job description when she’d taken Lucifer on as her partner.

“Why not your brother?” Chloe asked, frowning at the pair of them.

Lucifer and Sabrina exchanged a significant look.

“...still making apologies for Nana Morningstar,” Sabrina said flippantly.

“She’s still in town?”

“She is.” Lucifer’s expression had gone...strange, as if he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to be coldly furious or crack up laughing, and his facial muscles were working overtime to split the difference. “You  _ do  _ remember what she threatened to do to you if you ever called her that again?”

Sabrina sighed. “Drown me like a sack of kittens?”

There was a loud, indignant meow from the cat-carrier.

“No offence, Salem.”

“You do know she wasn’t actually joking about any of that...”

“Pretty sure I got the message the first time she equated my existence with bestiality, thanks.”

What was  _ wrong  _ with Lucifer’s family?

“...your grandmother said that to you?” Chloe asked, her eyes flicking to Lucifer and back to Sabrina, looking for some sort of denial,  _ anything _ .

Sabrina shrugged. “She said it about me. While I was in the same room. She doesn’t like talking to me if she can avoid it.”

“And your brother- He’s making  _ excuses  _ for this?”

“Why break the habit of millennia?” Lucifer said nastily. “He might not  _ agree  _ with Mum on the subject, but I’d rather not put Sabrina anywhere she might have to listen to that again, even if I don’t think Amenadiel would let Mum carry out any of her threats. Not if he  _ could  _ prevent it, anyway. Besides,” he added, his mouth quirking up into a small, genuine smile. “There’s no-one I’d rather trust with my spawn than you, Detective.”

Which was touching, but not exactly immediately helpful.

“Including yourself, by the look of it,” Chloe retorted. “Lucifer, there’s got to be another way…”

“Probably, but you’ve done undercover work before, and the hellspawn’s much more able to look after herself than your urchin.”

He was wearing his most appealing smile again now, the one he wore when he was trying to talk her into something she would never in a million years agree to.

Chloe groaned, low and heartfelt.

“If I say no to this, is there any chance at all you’ll stop?”

“Normally, Detective, I would be offended that you even had to ask. In this specific incidence, however…”

Chloe rolled her eyes. “That’s a no, then. Lucifer, you realise that if the department doesn’t sign off on this, you  _ could  _ end up in there permanently? You have to be declared a danger to yourself or others to even  _ get  _ a seventy-two-hour psychiatric hold, and-”

“And I can manage that easily enough.” Lucifer gave a wicked little smirk. “If they can keep me there a moment longer than I want to stay, I’ll  _ need  _ a few months in a nice quiet hospital to recover from the shock.”

“I’ll come visit,” Sabrina shot back. “Do they do ‘I told you so’ greeting cards?”

* * *

They did not, in fact, do ‘I told you so’ greeting cards. This was, so far as Sabrina was concerned, a serious gap in Hallmark’s repertoire. She’d made one herself with Trixie instead, using construction paper and glitter pens, and a pack of emoji stickers someone had given Trixie for Christmas last year. They’d used little devil faces for the ‘o’s.

One thing Sabrina definitely  _ hadn't  _ inherited from her father was discomfort around children - she’d been shy, at first, in the way of a teenager with no babysitting experience, but she at least seemed to understand the difference between a child and a dog, and after the first few minutes she and Trix had bonded  _ hard  _ over a shared belief that the best  _ Scooby-Doo  _ show of all time was the eighties one with Vincent Price and  _ real  _ ghosts for the team to fight, even if the lack of Velma lost it a few points - the show’s version of Daphne was, Trixie had said, a total badass, but so was Velma, and the two of them being badasses together would’ve been even better.

Chloe hadn’t spent much time with Lucifer’s daughter since she arrived in LA. Work had been keeping them both pretty busy and, honestly, she’d wanted some distance from Lucifer, and what she’d thought they might have. She’d  _ heard  _ a lot about Sabrina, though - or rather, she’d worked out a lot from the questions Lucifer kept faux-casually dropping into conversation. It had been weirdly sweet, during the Starford case, how desperately hard Lucifer was trying, despite everything.

Or so Chloe had thought, before he tried this stunt. Sabrina had actually had to  _ remind  _ Lucifer that she couldn’t stay at Lux on her own for three days - not above a nightclub, with her father in a mental institution - and not expect  _ someone  _ to start asking questions.

She’d expected Lucifer to look different, in here. She’d had horrible visions of flickering lights, hard-faced nurses, dull eyes and prison uniforms. She’d known even then that that wouldn’t be the case - she’d already been to Westridge for the orderly’s murder, she’d seen it wasn’t anything like that, and yes, she knew that images like that only contributed to the general demonisation of the mentally ill,  _ thank  _ you Ella. Still, that was what had sprung instantly to mind at the words ‘seventy-two hour psychiatric hold’, blame social conditioning or the toxicity of the media’s treatment of the mentally ill or whatever. It was a terrible relief to see Lucifer sitting at an easel in a room meant for art therapy, dressed in one of his own ridiculously high-end suits and looking insufferably pleased with himself.

“I brought you something!” Sabrina announced, by way of greeting, before Chloe could get a word out.

Lucifer perked up immediately. Since he had shown no signs of being anything but perky since they got there, the effect was rather overwhelming. “If I knew people would feel obliged to give me presents, I’d have got myself checked into a mental ward sooner!” He was already tearing open the envelope Trixie had insisted on - sealed with another sticker - as Sabrina rolled her eyes, and actually pouted at the card inside. “‘Dear Dad. I told you this was going to be a complete disaster, and I was right. Enjoy your time in lockdown, love from Sabrina and Trixie’...” he read aloud. “We’re doing  _ pre-emptive  _ ‘I told you so’s now? Isn’t that completely missing the point of saying you told me so? You’re supposed to wait until  _ after  _ whatever you were warning me about has happened. Which,” he added, “It won’t.”

“It will, and I wanted to be sure you had the card by then, just in case they wouldn’t let me back in to see you. You know, since you’re officially a danger to yourself and others and all?”

“It’s not going to come to that,” Chloe said firmly, “If anything goes wrong, I’m getting you out, case or no case. And speaking of the case, is that why you punched Johnson? Or is he actually…”

“I don’t know,” Lucifer admitted, and then, at her dubious look. “Oh, I’m quite sure he’s the killer, but whether or not he is...who he says he is…a little more difficult.”

Chloe frowned. This was getting disturbing, fast. “You said your father...likes to hide his identity? He hid it from you?”

“Sometimes. He was calling himself Zephkiel, when-” he cut himself off, his face closing up, the shutters rattling closed behind his eyes.

It wasn’t much, but it was one more scrap of information to add to the file Chloe was amassing.

There wasn’t much - ‘Silver City’ had turned up thirteen towns in the US, one in Canada, two in Australia that had that for an official name, and nine more worldwide that had it for a nickname. The drowned kids Lucifer had mentioned were another puzzle piece, which had led her to a lot of horrible cases, but none which quite lined up with the cult element she was now quite certain had been there. Besides, it hadn’t sounded like the perpetrators had gotten caught. God Johnson, who apparently resembled Lucifer’s dad enough for there to be confusion, and the name ‘Zephkiel’ were the best lead Chloe had had yet. If any of this was true. If Lucifer really wasn’t delusional.

Chloe wished she could feel a bit more certain of that. And Lucifer’s next words really didn’t help that at all. Santa Claus? Honestly? It was probably a joke, she knew, and if he’d said it under any other circumstances, she’d have just rolled her eyes, but...maybe this place had changed things after all. Things she would have brushed off a week ago kept sticking in her mind, and she couldn’t quite stop it from happening.

Sabrina, next to her, had taken things much more in stride.

“-didn’t tell you about Mr Bartel, did I? My friend Theo worked for him over Christmas, before he came out - he was the department store Santa at Knights of St Bernard Hall in Greendale - and I swear, I would never have guessed he was actually murdering kids and turning them into waxworks…”

Chloe’s mind kicked back into gear. “...he was what?”

Sabrina looked very much like Trixie caught with chocolate around her mouth.

“...uh, nothing,” she said quickly. “My friends and I do...do LARPing. Back home. I haven’t found a group here yet. I mean, there’s Cousin Montgomery, but she isn’t...we’re not…”

“You have more family in the city?” Chloe asked, not quite able to help herself. More information couldn’t do any harm, not at this stage.

“Other side of the family,” Lucifer put in. “So, was this all you came for? To make sure I knew you had no faith in me?”

Sabrina frowned. “Dad- You know I didn’t mean it like-”

“Then how did you mean it?”

Sabrina huffed out a breath. “I  _ meant  _ it because you checked yourself into a mental institution with a guy you think is the Fal- is a murderer, your abusive father or  _ both _ -”

“‘Abusive’ isn’t the word I’d choose-”

Chloe had to disagree on that one, remembering Lucifer’s scars.

“-and you don’t even see why I’m worried about this!” Sabrina was actually starting to look genuinely distressed. “Dad, last time something like this happened, it was when Aunt Zelda was getting married to Father Blackwood, and that ended with- I mean, we both know how  _ that  _ ended-”

Lucifer was staring at Sabrina in complete hapless confusion, and it would’ve almost been cute if it weren’t so clear that he did not have the first idea what he was doing.

“-and I know you can’t- That you don’t need to worry about the...the normal problems, but if it really  _ is  _ him-”

“Then I’ll enjoy the chance for a rematch,” Lucifer said, in a tone that sounded like it was trying to be comforting, but came out mostly baffled.

“She’s right,” Chloe cut in. “Lucifer- I know that letting cases get to you on a personal level is basically what you do, but this is ridiculous even by your standards.”

That, of course, was just a red rag to a Lucifer, because Chloe couldn’t get another word of sense out of him from there on in, and even Sabrina’s puppy-dog eyes couldn’t make much headway. The rest of the conversation got eaten up by Sabrina explaining what LARPing was to a confused and snarky Lucifer, and then telling the full story of Mr Bartel the murderous mall Santa, which Lucifer seemed to find a lot more interesting than the preceding explanation, and kept interrupting with questions about the plot. Chloe would’ve found the whole thing a lot funnier and more endearing if she was quite sure Lucifer could tell the difference between the game and reality. And it was really increasingly starting to look as if he  _ couldn’t _ .

“He doesn’t deserve you,” Lucifer was saying now, about some sort of development between Sabrina’s character and her boyfriend’s - Chloe had lost track of the plot around the point the monster got killed - “I could have told you that from the first time I met him.”

“He’s not that bad!”

“He is  _ absolutely  _ that bad, and I’m ashamed any daughter of mine didn’t think she could do better.”

“What if I didn’t  _ want  _ to do better?”

Lucifer blinked at her in incomprehension. “He rejected a fundamental aspect of who you are, and you didn’t want to do better?”

Sabrina shook her head. “I- It’s complicated. I mean...you heard about what happened with Tommy…”

“You made mistakes. If he was going to forgive you, he should  _ forgive  _ you, and not keep bringing them up every time you get into another row.”

It didn’t sound like they were talking about the game anymore.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Sabrina said quickly. “We’re over. He’s dating Roz now, and I...have Nicholas.  _ Had  _ Nicholas.”

“Well, that’s a  _ slight  _ improvement,” Lucifer said judiciously. 

Sabrina snorted. “What happened to not attempting to dictate my sexual development?”

“I promised I wouldn’t get in your way as long as your partners were age-appropriate and consensual. I never said I wouldn’t judge.”

Chloe was going to say something, but then she heard someone clearing their throat behind her, and looked around to see a nurse looking significantly at the three of them. Right. Apparently visiting hours were over.

Chloe got buttonholed by Doctor Garrity almost as soon as they were out of the art therapy room, leaving Sabrina waiting in the stairwell, looking completely unconcerned by her father’s apparent inability to tell the difference between LARPing and real life. Maybe she was used to it. Chloe couldn’t exactly point fingers if she was. She’d never really considered Lucifer’s... _ eccentricities _ ...to be a serious psychological problem before this - at least, not one more serious than Linda could deal with.

Unfortunately, the moment Doctor Garrity was called away for music therapy, Maze called, and it took the whole phone call for Chloe to convince her that, no, Doctor Garrity  _ wasn’t  _ trying to sleep with her.

When she went to find Sabrina, Chloe found her talking to God Johnson. Because of course she was. Chloe really should’ve expected that. The Morningstar tendency to throw themselves headlong into trouble had, if half of what Sabrina had said about her cousin Ambrose since she’d come to stay with Chloe and Trixie was true, only been exacerbated by the Spellman tendency to do the exact same thing.

“-should probably have done something about that sooner, but...sometimes, when it’s a person you love, you don’t want to see it until it’s too late,” Johnson was saying when Chloe rounded the corner. “But nothing exists in this world that wasn’t meant to. You’re not an abomination. Quite the opposite. I think you’re just what Samael needed.”

Sabrina was eyeing him suspiciously, and Chloe couldn’t blame her. “...thanks,” she said warily. “You’re...not exactly what I was expecting either.”

Chloe cleared her throat - whether or not she was as certain as Lucifer that this guy was guilty, he was still a suspect - and watched Sabrina jump and look around.

“Ready to go?” she asked.

Sabrina nodded, her eyes flicking back to Johnson and away again. “...yeah,” she said, a little reluctantly. “I think I am.”

* * *

By the time Sabrina arrived at the crime scene, Nurse Kipsy had been cuffed and taken away, and Earl Johnson was in his right mind again, with apparently no memory of the months he’d spent at Westridge, convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was God. Chloe was doing her best not to picture what would happen if that were Lucifer, if he woke up one day and suddenly he was...whoever he had been...again, before whatever traumas drove him to become the Lucifer she knew.

Lucifer was still high as a kite on the haldol he’d been dosed with, though Chloe had got him unstrapped from the gurney and sitting up, with a shock blanket around his shoulders. Chloe was trying pretty hard not to imagine what would’ve happened if she’d been that little bit later on the scene, to add one more to the long, long list of ways this whole plan could’ve gone disastrously wrong.

The kid was white as a sheet when she stumbled in, and Chloe couldn’t blame her.

“Is he…”

“He’s all right,” Chloe said hastily, “He’s just a bit out of it right now. Should recover soon enough, though, given his usual tolerance.”

Sabrina nodded, chewing at her bottom lip. “...right.” She swallowed. “I just- I never…thought he could really get hurt, before.”

He’d got himself strangled on Sabrina’s first day in LA, the way Chloe remembered it, but then, by the time he’d got back to Sabrina, Lucifer had been his usual self, without any sign that Kennedy had nearly killed him. It wasn’t nearly the same thing.

“I know,” she said. “I- My dad was a cop. It never stopped being terrifying, when he’d come home injured.”

Sabrina nodded shakily. “Right, but…”

“You can see him,” Chloe nudged. “It’s all right. He should be out by tomorrow, now we can claim this was an undercover operation all along.”

Sabrina wavered in the doorway a moment longer, and then went in.

Lucifer was still wearing that same bright, beaming smile, the one that said that the haldol hadn’t worn off yet.

“Sabrina!” he said airily, making to get up and nearly falling over in the process before dropping back to sit on the edge of the gurney. “ _ Now _ you get to say you told me so!”

Sabrina made a choky sort of noise in her throat, and hurried over. “Like I care about that now!” she nearly snapped, “Dad, you nearly  _ died _ -”

“I didn’t.”

“But you could- Why am I arguing with you? You’re drugged!”

Sabrina raked a hand through her fair hair, and Lucifer’s arm came up, apparently of its own accord, to wrap around her shoulders and pull her that bit closer. Chloe stared. Lucifer was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a hugger. He  _ tolerated  _ hugs from Trixie or Ella, without much grace, and seemed more comfortable with slaps than any sort of affectionate gesture. It wasn’t something Chloe let herself think about very often, and it hurt whenever she did. Lucifer seemed about as confused by the gesture as Chloe felt, staring at his own arm in blank fascination, but all the tension had drained clean out of him and Sabrina both, as she leant against him, and muttered against his shoulder:

“But I  _ did  _ tell you so.”

Lucifer’s face did something odd at that, like he was trying to roll his eyes but had forgotten which muscles were responsible for making that happen, and Chloe had to bite back a laugh.

“I’m sure there’ll be plenty of time to figure out whose fault this is later,” she said instead.

Lucifer’s nose wrinkled. “...the nurse?” he suggested, in a distracted sort of tone. “I think it was the nurse. She was going to make Dad strangle me, but then he didn’t, and now he’s mad at me again…”

“He can’t be that mad if he didn’t strangle you,” Sabrina said, butting her head against Lucifer’s shoulder like a cat. Well,  _ that  _ logic wasn’t fucked up at all.

“Lucifer,” Chloe added, “You...you know that isn’t really your dad, right?”

Lucifer blinked at her. “...he remembered Mum, though,” he said, bewildered.

“About that,” Chloe said, as carefully and gently as she could. “So far as anyone can tell, he was just...suggestible. He’s never met you before in his life.”

Lucifer stared up at her with great brown eyes, uncomprehending, and Chloe rubbed her eyes.

“...never mind. We can deal with that once you’re sober.” She glanced over at Sabrina, who was still pale and worried, even if she looked better than she had when she’d come in. “I’m not comfortable sending Lucifer back to Lux on his own in this state, and with you on the couch there isn’t really room at the apartment-”

“I understand. I just…” Sabrina swallowed. “I should be  _ used  _ to this,” she muttered, furiously, more to herself than Chloe.

“You’ve only been here two weeks,” Chloe reminded her. “It’s not- Nobody expects you to have a handle on everything. None of this was meant to happen. I should’ve got him out sooner.”

“I told you,” Lucifer said, unhelpfully, “I’ve never felt better!”

Sabrina snorted. “No offence, but I’m not about to take your word for it until I know you know what you’re saying.”

“And I closed the case.”

“ _ I _ closed the case,” Chloe corrected. “ _ You _ nearly got hung-”

“‘m already-”

“Hanged,” Sabrina cut him off, wincing. “Sorry. Auntie Zee gets  _ particular  _ about grammar.”

“-because you went in undercover without any real backup,” Chloe finished. “Do you have any idea how close you came to getting killed?”

Lucifer blinked up at her some more, and Chloe suppressed a sigh. Of course he didn’t. So far as Lucifer was concerned, consequences were something that happened to other people.

“ _ I _ am going to have to sort things out with the hospital to get you out tomorrow,” she said, rather than deal with him anymore. “Sabrina, I can give you a lift back to the apartment when it’s time to leave, or Maze can, if you want to stay a bit longer…”

“It’s fine,” Sabrina said hastily. “I’ll go with you.”

Chloe nodded. “All right. I’ll sort things with the hospital, you...keep an eye on your dad.”

She looked back as she cleared out in search of someone in authority. Sabrina was talking quietly, too low for Chloe to hear, and for a moment, Chloe could swear she saw light blooming in the cup of the kid’s hand, before she blinked, and the illusion was gone.


	2. In Which Yule Is Not Christmas, But It's Close Enough

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Being a story of how religious holidays become awkward when your deity shows up for them, Mazikeen gets better at choosing age-appropriate presents, and Sabrina really needs to stop and think before she goes for the grand gestures.  
> Set mid-S3, after Sabrina has gone back to Greendale for the start of the school year.

Lux had never been known to do anything special for Christmas, and since finding out that Lucifer had been telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about who he was since the day they met, Chloe could see why, but their New Year’s parties were the stuff of legend. Which was why it came as such a surprise when Lucifer announced, out of the blue, that he’d be missing the party this year.

“...get invited to a secret Illuminati sex party or something?” she asked, as Lucifer, oblivious, prodded at the corpse in front of them in delighted fascination.

“What- Oh, no. Sabrina has this _thing_ about the holidays.”

Chloe smirked. She couldn’t quite help it. “And she also has _you_ wrapped ‘round her little finger. So if she says ‘Christmas’-” she broke off. “Witches celebrate Christmas?” Because, yes, Sabrina had been pretty vague about a lot of the witchcraft thing, but she was pretty sure that worshipping Lucifer was in there somewhere, given how much they both complained about it.

Lucifer gave a so-so little wave of his hand. “Yule, technically, which is where half of these Christmas traditions started, so close enough. Though Diana was Catholic, so Sabrina grew up with both.”

Catholic, but fine marrying a Satanist and having a threesome with the Devil. A threesome which produced the literal _Antichrist_ , even if Sabrina was a sweet kid when you ignored her absolute conviction that the universe owed her special privileges. Chloe shook her head, more certain than ever that she would never understand religious people of _any_ denomination.

“...right,” she said, rather than trying to put any of that into words. “So, you’re going up to...what’s the town called again?”

“Greendale. A postage stamp in Massachusetts notable only for Sabrina and having the Gates of Hell somewhere in the local mines.”

Chloe snorted a laugh. “Those aren’t actually a thing, are they?”

“Oh, they definitely are. Should be all sealed up by now, though, unless Sabrina and her friends dropped the ball on that.”

Ok. Ok. Literal gates to literal Hell. In Massachusetts. Right. Even months after she’d found out just how much bigger the world was than she had known about, it was still possible to get that rug-pulled-out-underneath her feeling, the way she had the first few weeks after she saw Sabrina summoning hellfire in her and Trixie’s defence.

Chloe had her own plans for Christmas. Last year had been Dan’s turn to take Trixie to a family Christmas at the Espinozas. This year it was Chloe’s, which meant trying to rein her mother in on the decorating and making sure Trix’s present wasn’t about a decade too old for her. She had a backup present bought, wrapped and labelled just in case, but she’d prefer not to need it.

Chloe’s leave didn’t start until the twenty-third - Christmas Adam, as Ella had referred to it, by which it was meant that it came before Eve and was generally unsatisfying. Lucifer had laughed himself sick at that, before agreeing that it was probably accurate. The world’s first marriage had apparently not been a happy one - but Lucifer left for Massachusetts on the nineteenth. Pierce had given him shit about that, but between Lucifer’s connections higher up the ladder and the fact that as a consultant Lucifer didn’t have a set amount of leave time anyway, there wasn’t much he could do.

He texted her six hours later, with a picture of an equestrian statue put through four different instagram filters and looking very much the worse for it, and Chloe rolled her eyes, texted back a reminder that when she’d told him never to ghost her again, she’d _meant_ ‘no disappearing off to Vegas without a word’, or ‘no planning to move halfway across the country in a fit of gloom because I’m a bit overwhelmed by the fact that you are literal Satan’ and not ‘bombard me with pictures of famous Boston landmarks with added dog ears and noses’. It didn’t seem to stop him.

Her phone buzzed again on the evening of the twenty-first, as Chloe was going over their suspect’s alibi for having strangled and electrocuted her mother with a string of Christmas lights - pretty watertight, so far as she could make out, but there was something about the timestamp on the videos that set her teeth on edge - and she checked it absent-mindedly, just in case it was something relevant.

_‘Why do all witch rituals involve cheesy rhyming couplets?’_

_‘I’m not entirely clear on holiday rituals, but aren’t you supposed to_ want _supernatural entities to come down your chimney?’_

_‘Your urchin was very definite about that.’_

There was a string of emojis after that, which Chloe didn’t bother trying to puzzle out. Lucifer’s hieroglyphic attitude to emojis was far too much to deal with after the day she’d had.

She woke up the next morning to a middle-aged car salesman found with a sharpened candy-cane shoved through his throat like an impromptu shiv and another string of texts.

_‘Apparently Satanic Midnight Mass ‘would just be awkward’ with me here.’_

_‘On the one hand, no dealing with worshippers.’_

_‘On the other, can these people do anything without ripping off Dad?’_

_‘Evidence points to ‘no’.’_

The body was, it turned out, entirely unrelated to the first one - apparently the holidays this year have led to a lot of people murdering their relatives in gruesome Christmas-related ways - and as Chloe was slapping the cuffs on murderer number two, with murderer the first already in one of the uniforms’ cruiser, her phone buzzed again with yet another text from Lucifer.

_‘Please tell me there’s a serial killer rampaging across Los Angeles that you can’t possibly catch without your partner.’_

Chloe grinned to herself, and replied:

 _‘Not anymore.’_ And then, before she could stop herself. _‘Yule with the Spellmans really that bad?’_

There was a long pause, the three ‘waiting’ dots spooling out over and over again, and then:

_‘Hilda knitted me a sweater. A sweater.’_

Chloe could almost see the look on his face, and only long practice at not reacting to Lucifer’s shenanigans in any way that could be construed as encouragement kept her from laughing.

She shot back, _‘This I have to see!’_ and by the time the crime scene had been thoroughly checked over for any remaining evidence, a reply had come in.

_‘I never agreed to wear it.’_

Chloe snorted. _‘Tell me that you aren’t wearing it now._ ’ she sent back. Lucifer did not have a good record when it came to the Spellman patented puppy-eyes. Poetic justice, since the Morningstar brand was just as dangerously effective, and Sabrina had inherited the best of both.

Lucifer didn’t reply, which she took as a ‘yes, but I don’t want to admit it’, and Chloe smirked to herself, pocketed her phone, and headed back to start booking their killers. With any luck, there wouldn’t be a third murder to force her to consider the idea of a Christmas-themed version of Azrael’s blade.

There wasn’t, which at this point probably qualified as a Christmas miracle all on its own. If Lucifer were here, he’d be whining about how boring it was. Chloe was just glad she wouldn’t have to take an extra day before her leave started, or worse, hand over her case half-solved to another detective. Just because the precinct had accepted she’d been right about Palmetto after the facts were shoved down their throats didn’t mean they’d changed the way they did things, after all. Her mom’s plane came in tomorrow, and after that she was booked solid until Penelope went back to New York for her usual New Year’s Eve party there. Hopefully this time she’d remember that Trixie was still a few years too young for make-up, especially the sort of make-up Penelope kept buying for her. Chloe didn’t care how nice a shade it was, anything labelled ‘lust’ did _not_ belong on a kid still in elementary school.

Trix seemed to have hit a plateau of pre-Christmas excitement by now, at least. NORAD’s Santa Tracker wasn't online yet, the preparations were all done but the cooking, which was never the main attraction of a Decker family Christmas anyway...there really wasn’t anything left to get excited _about_ until Penelope actually got there, and with any luck that would be the sort of excitement that meant going to bed early so tomorrow would get here sooner.

That hope died a swift and ignominious death, however, when she got home to find Trixie nearly bouncing off the walls and a parcel sitting innocently on the kitchen counter, wrapped in red paper with a pattern of what might be golden crescent moons or sickles, depending on whether the oblong bit at the tip of the crescent was meant to be a cloud or a handle. 

Maze, whose bag was on the table ready for her to leave - she’d found an extended contract over Christmas to bring in a couple of bounties, specifically so as not to be there when Penelope Decker arrived - jerked her head at the present.

“Appeared out of thin air a couple minutes back. Figure it’s from the princess.”

Chloe eyed the package warily. “...any chance that we’ve suddenly acquired supernatural enemies who want to send a trap disguised as a Christmas present?”

She checked the tag anyway - _‘_ _Bright_ _Solstice_ _and_ _Merry_ _Christmas_ _from_ _Sabrina_ _and_ _Salem’_ but anyone could’ve written that. 

“Offended any witches lately?” Maze asked, shrugging. “It smells like it's from her.”

Chloe nodded. “I’ll got put it under the tree, then-”

Trixie scowled, scuffing her socked foot along the floor. “Do you _have_ to?” she whined. “I mean…it’s not a _Christmas_ Christmas present. Sabrina says witches have Christmas three days early!”

“They have Solstice, monkey - it’s not the same thing.”

Sabrina had made a few noises about blood sacrifice being a thing that not even the most old-fashioned covens did anymore - the Greendale Church of Night having been one of said old-fashioned covens - and Chloe hoped she’d been telling the truth. Even so, it was enough to make Trixie’s current ‘witch phase’ more than a little worrying.

“But what if it’s something magic?”

“Then you’ll just have to wait and find out.”

“In front of Grandma?”

Chloe paused.

She didn’t _think_ Sabrina was going to send anything too obviously unsuitable...but Sabrina’s idea of obvious levels of supernatural interference was more than a little skewed.

“...all right,” she said grudgingly. “You can open this one present early. Just in case it’s something Grandma shouldn’t see.”

Maze raised an eyebrow. “Knives come under that heading?”

“What- Yes, of course they-” Chloe stopped. “Maze, _tell me_ you didn’t get my daughter a _knife_ for Christmas.”

“I didn’t get your kid a knife for Christmas,” Maze parroted obediently.

Chloe narrowed her eyes. “...how many knives did you get her?”

“Just the two. She doesn’t have enough hands for more than that yet. They’re not the really sharp kind,” Maze added, “Kid’s a badass, she knows not to cut herself with them.”

“That’s not the-” Chloe cut herself off, remembering the man, the missionary, who’d lost a couple fingers even before Sabrina brought out the Hellfire. “I don’t want her hurting anyone else either,” she admitted.

Maze shrugged. “She won’t. Unless they deserve it.”

“Maze!” Chloe rubbed her face. “...all right. She can open yours now too, and then I’ll…” _decide whether or not it’s going in the ‘confiscated until she’s at least eighteen’ drawer_ was what she wanted to say, but couldn’t, so she gave a vague sort of shrug instead.

Trixie, of course, had already run off to fetch the oddly-shaped package in sparkly black paper from under the tree, entirely forgetting Sabrina’s package. Chloe rubbed her eyes, and wondered just how big a fit Trixie would throw if she confiscated Maze’s Christmas present the moment she finished unwrapping it.

The package was a lot bigger than Chloe remembered, and definitely too big to contain only two knives. She cast a suspicious look at Maze, who attempted to look innocent. Not having much practice, it wasn’t a very convincing expression, although she at least deserved a few points for effort.

“Do you want to start with Sabrina’s present?” Chloe asked, gesturing at said present, which now looked considerably more acceptable than it had before she got a hint of what Maze was buying Trixie.

Trixie frowned, eyeing Maze’s present wistfully, and Chloe caved. If nothing else, letting her keep the second present she opened would probably do more to stave off a tantrum.

“All right, Maze first. If it’s appropriate,” she added quickly, glaring at Maze, who beamed back unashamed.

Trixie unwrapping a parcel looked like something that belonged in a television show about the bomb squad. If someone had told her that her presents would explode if she jostled them the wrong way, the exaggerated care with which she peeled off tape and unfolded the corners would’ve looked disproportionate even so.

Chloe was already dreading finding out just how many weapons Maze had decided it was appropriate to give an eight-year-old when Trixie got through the last of the wrapping paper, only to reveal...rollerskates.

Black leather rollerskates with ‘Hell on Wheels’ embroidered on the side, with a little pair of horns on the ‘H’ and a pointy tail at the end of the ‘S’, but still...just rollerskates.

Chloe gaped at Mazikeen.

“...I thought you got her knives!” was all she could manage to say.

Maze snorted. “Why would I want to do that? Like I said, she can’t manage more than two at a time yet.”

“...you already got my kid knives?” Chloe demanded.

Maze shrugged. “I mean...you never complained before? Can’t have caused too much trouble.”

“That’s not...I don’t…” Chloe drew in a deep breath. “We are going to _talk_ about this, when you get back,” she warned. “Trix, why don’t you open Sabrina’s now?”

Sabrina’s package had looked big and squashy before, but that was just the three layers of wrapping paper it had been wrapped with - in different colours and patterns, even, so no way it was accidental. And at the centre of it all was a box, with an envelope sitting on top of it.

Trixie went for the box. Chloe snagged the envelope.

_‘Dear Trixie,_

_No offence to your knife skills, but I figured this might be a bit more use for the next time someone decides to try kidnapping you. And you did say you wanted to try turning people into frogs._

_Bright Solstice, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year,_

_Love,_

_Sabrina_

_P.S. - the second half of your present should be outside right now._

_P.P.S. - Chloe, I know you said I didn’t need to get you anything, and Dad doesn’t do Christmas anyway, but I thought you’d get a kick out of this.’_

Chloe frowned, and then noticed something else, still in the envelope.

It was a photograph - an old-fashioned Polaroid, probably taken on an actual camera with actual film - of a somewhat disgruntled Lucifer in what looked like a Victorian sitting-room, dressed in a ludicrously red sweater with a horned, demonic figure on the front, and a pattern of chains and dancing demons around the rest of it. He was wearing the faintly poleaxed expression of someone who wasn’t sure how they’d got into their current situation, but was pretty sure they didn’t like it, and Chloe couldn’t do anything but laugh at it.

“Mommy?” 

Chloe clapped a hand over her mouth to cut off the snickering, and looked up.

“Yes, monkey?”

Trixie held out her wrist, beaming and Chloe felt a moment’s apprehension at the memory of that line about the kidnapping, but Sabrina’s present looked, on the surface, like a perfectly ordinary charm bracelet, the sort you could see on any number of girls Trixie’s age.

Granted, the little pentagram charm was a bit disturbing. As was the little red-enamelled one shaped like a fireball. And the green-enamelled frog next to it, when you remembered how interested Trixie had been in the frog thing. Chloe quietly resolved to call Sabrina later and ask if any of them had actual magical properties _before_ Trixie found out for herself.

“I’m going to try out the frog one on Bobby!” Trixie said gleefully, nearly bouncing in place.

“...maybe hold off on that?” Chloe suggested. “At least until you’ve figured out how to turn him back?”

“I can’t turn people back until I’ve turned them into something…”

“Hold off on it anyway- Maze, what is it?”

Maze was staring out the window. “...huh,” she muttered. “...what do you want to bet that’s natural?”

“What’s natur- Oh.”

When Chloe had left work, it had been seventy degrees balmy Fahrenheit. Now, the sky was grey and overcast, and fat little flakes of snow were falling, lightly now, but the clouds overhead promised that they’d get heavier before too long.

The freak snowstorm grounded every plane coming in and out of LA for the next week, forced Chloe to wrangle her mother and Maze at the same time until New Year’s, and caused the biggest traffic jam in LA history. Trixie had never been happier.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This isn't quite as polished as I'd like it to be, since it's Christmas and I haven't had much time to write it, but I really wanted to get this out before Boxing Day, so...here we are.  
> I'm also sorry for another Chloe-POV chapter. I promise, I can and will do other POVs.  
> And, to everyone, whatever winter holidays you do or do not celebrate - Merry Wednesday.


	3. In Which Lucifer Confronts the Cat-Proofing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein what was supposed to be a fluffy little piece about a cat palace developed unexpected depths and darkness.

It was past midnight by the time they got back from the Orpheum. Actually, between four movies and dinner, it was so far past midnight that they really ought to start calling it tomorrow morning. Not that it had dimmed his spawn’s enthusiasm any. They’d eaten at an all-night place a few streets away from Lux whose owner had for some reason he could never adequately explain taken a liking to Lucifer, while Sabrina expounded at length on the deeper meaning, cultural history and subsequent ramifications of the Omen series in popular culture, as well as the rumours of a curse on the film’s production that Lucifer was _pretty_ sure he hadn’t been responsible for. It seemed she’d understated the matter when she said she liked horror movies. Lucifer was beginning to get the impression that, given the choice, Sabrina would do nothing _but_ watch horror movies for the rest of her life, however many centuries that turned out to be, and then dissect them in painstaking detail afterwards. It felt...nice. Like long days in the Silver City before seasons were invented, but which always felt like summer in Lucifer’s memory, braiding Azrael’s long hair and listening to her chatter away about everything and anything that came to mind. Before...Before Carasel. Before Lucifer saw, for the first time, the terrible injustice of God.

That wasn’t the sort of thought it was safe for him to have. He could let himself remember Amenadiel, Raguel, sometimes even Uriel. But Azrael, Castiel, Raphael...the siblings he’d loved best, who had abandoned him just as thoroughly as all the rest...they were different. He tried not to think about them. Thankfully, Sabrina was more than willing to distract him, even if she didn’t yet know that was what she was doing.

“-the casting for this movie was genius from start to finish,” she was saying as the elevator doors closed on Lux - the party wasn’t quite _over_ yet, but definitely winding down - “Like- Atticus freaking Finch as a guy whose main plotline involves murdering - well, attempting to murder - his own son? Really works for the whole ‘subverted innocence’ theme of the whole film. The established order turned upside down. The priests are in league with the Devil, Mary Poppins is trying to murder her employer, the ambassador is willing to commit child-murder…”

“Business as usual, then,” Lucifer said brightly.

Sabrina snorted. “You know what I mean. Everyone you’re supposed to trust is a part of the conspiracy. It’s half of what gives the film its power. Other than...y’know...making you root for a child-murderer.”

“Was I supposed to be rooting for him? I thought it was more like watching a car crash - you’re not standing there cheering for whichever car has the nicer paint-job. Besides, in theory this Damien person is your little brother. While I do completely understand wishing horrible fates on your siblings…”

Sabrina laughed. “...you don’t actually have other kids out there, do you? I mean...that you know about?”

“Not off the top of my head, no. Then again, since I _did_ manage to completely miss that there was a ritual going on…”

Sabrina had gone very pale. “Oh, Sa- Go- Somebody, there must be thousands of us.”

“Not quite that many - it’s not as though I get summoned for sex all the time…” Lucifer paused, and then decided he’d better rephrase that. “Well, not in the pentagrams-and-incense sense, anyway.”

Sabrina’s nose wrinkled. “Do you have to keep forcing me to picture my parents having sex?”

“I said I’d keep it out of common areas in future, what more do you want from me?”

Sabrina shrugged. “A pony is traditional?”

“Oh, is that all?” Lucifer asked, brightening. That wouldn’t be difficult at all - he’d already given at least one person he knew a horse and permanent stabling rights in exchange for a few small favours, so getting another one wouldn’t be difficult. And the Detective had implied parenting was going to be _hard_. “Entirely doable - any specifications? Breed, age, size, coat colour, willingness to bite your enemies…”

“Not really!” Sabrina burst out, “Dad- It’s fine. I really don’t need a pony. I mean...where would I even keep one?”

“Obviously I’d pay for stabling too…”

“That’s not the- I don’t _actually_ want a pony. It’s just...a thing kids ask for, that they know they’re never going to get.”

Well, _that_ made no logical sense. If you knew you weren’t going to get something no matter how persuasively you asked for it, why bother asking at all?

...Then again, that was one way of describing Lucifer’s rebellion, at the beginning, when he’d wanted justice and free will and...well, he wouldn’t say he’d wanted a pony then, but he wouldn’t have been opposed if Dad had decided to throw one in with the rest of his demands. As it was, he’d ended up with no justice, no free will, and no pony either. Just one long freestyle plummet into a lake of boiling sulphur and, when he’d finally dragged himself out the other side, a fractious kingdom full of empty cells and falling ash and the terrible, terrible silence of the damned. 

Thanks for that, Dad. Really.

Sabrina sighed. “...You’re wearing your ‘mortals are confusing’ face again.”

“Am not,” Lucifer snapped, revolted.

“Yes, you are. It’s almost, but not exactly, the same as your ‘I am deeply offended by this but can’t articulate why’ face.”

The lift doors thankfully opened again before Lucifer was forced to explain that he did not possess any such face. Either of them. No such expression had ever crossed his face, which was the sole preserve of devilish smirks of various degrees, thank you very much.

The apartment hadn’t changed at all since he’d brought Sabrina and her luggage in, introduced her around to the daytime staff at Lux. Ancient Sumerian walls, camel-coloured leather sofas, Sabrina had put her cases away, well-stocked bookshelves, grand piano, enormous pointy thing that might be an art installation or a very small jungle gym, bar…Lucifer was already at the bar, pouring himself a healthy slug of single malt, when his brain caught up with his eyes to suggest that something in the apartment was not, in fact, as it should be.

He looked up.

From the highest tower of its palace, Sabrina’s awful cat looked back at him.

The cat palace was taller than Lucifer by a good three feet. There were turrets. And slides. And ramps. And ladders. And tunnels. It was, at present, taking up most of the floor space in front of an antique Sumerian wall, and it was perhaps the most terrible thing Lucifer had ever seen in his life.

“...hellspawn,” he said, in the calm and measured voice of madness. “What is that supposed to be?”

Sabrina frowned, looked up at the cat, looked back, all innocence.

“It’s for Salem. You _said_ to get the apartment cat-proofed…”

“Cat- _proofed_ , not…” Lucifer waved a hand at whatever the abomination in fluffy blonde false-fur was meant to be. “Remodelled to be the cat’s home first and mine a very distant second.”

“Third,” Sabrina corrected, smirking at him. It was still disconcerting, seeing that smirk on a face not his own. “Since there’s only one of us Salem listens to.”

Cats were not, in Lucifer’s experience, very good at listening. He still remembered when Father was designing them, agonising day after day about the lines, the paws, the vocalisations. The worst part had been his absolute certainty that Lucifer would just _love_ the awful little beasts, which had made Lucifer resolve to hate them almost before they were through being designed. It hadn’t been difficult. Cats were, by and large, arseholes. The sort of animal that would look you in the eye before knocking something expensive off a high shelf just to see it shatter, shed all over your best suits and throw up hairballs in your shoes, then pretend that being fluffy and making an appealing sound was enough to make up for all their other shortcomings.

“So you give it a height advantage from which to stare contemptuously down at us?” he asked, rather than say any of that. “As our new lord and master? Are you going to want me to put in an altar?”

Sabrina huffed. “Salem isn’t _contemptuous_ ,” she said haughtily. “Unless people deserve it. He saved my life at the Academy. And it’s not like he can go outside here - either we need some sort of cat-fence on your balcony, or we’ll have to keep him indoors, and he needs _some_ kind of enrichment either way. There should be a couple of dishes for him in the kitchen, and the litter tray is the self-cleaning kind…but if you think he’d _like_ an altar…”

“Absolutely not!”

Sabrina’s smirk only grew wider, only to disappear entirely as the cat stuck its head out from its turret, and then launched itself at her like a furry black cannonball.

“Salem!” Sabrina exclaimed, half-laughing, and apparently completely unfazed by the sudden armful of cat. “Did- Did something happen while we were out?”

“Other than my whole apartment being redesigned for feline use?” Lucifer muttered.

“Oh, get over yourself!” Sabrina retorted, and then, hastily. “I mean...I _can_ keep Salem here? You said I could…”

And they were back to this.

Lucifer really, honestly wished that he could say his daughter had never been afraid of him. Fatherhood wasn’t something he’d ever really considered before, but if he had, it would’ve been a good first step, that she wasn’t afraid. The sort of love that came intermingled with fear, what he felt for his Father, for Mum...it wasn’t something he’d ever wanted to be on the other end of. He wasn’t especially fond of the version of it he felt for his parents, and receiving it had not made him like it any better.

Unfortunately for all of them, Sabrina had grown up around _worshippers_ , and that was never a good start to a relationship. Something about the threat of smiting the moment you put a toe out of line always managed to get in the way somehow.

Funny, but Lucifer had never felt that way until Saraquael. But then, Father had never smote anyone before that. Lucifer hadn’t even known it was an option. And then he had, and it was all any of them could think about.

A lifetime of religious terror wasn’t something Lucifer could overcome in a week and change. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to try it.

He sighed. “...It’s better than getting cat hair on my furniture, I suppose.” If nothing else, buying a massive cat-palace and getting it set up in his apartment was a pretty good sign that she meant to come back after the summer was over.

Sabrina laughed, though from the sound of it it was less because anything was funny than because she was relieved she hadn’t been smote.

“Yeah, I think that’s going to happen anyway…”

Lucifer glared up at the encroaching feline, which regally ignored him in favour of cuddling into Sabrina’s shirt and covering it in fine black hairs. “I’m sure they _do_ hairless cats…”

“Dad. You aren’t threatening to _shave_ Salem.”

Lucifer wasn’t, in fact. From what he understood, familiars could shapeshift perfectly well all by themselves, even if they did end up picking up some of the essential character of whatever species they turned into. “You said yourself that he wasn’t really a cat…”

“But he likes being cat-shaped. Don’t you, Salem?”

Lucifer had never quite understood why cat-owners felt the need to descend into baby-talk every few minutes. If you tried that on a hellhound, it would rip your throat out in very short order.

...perhaps it was for the best that he hadn’t been around when Sabrina was turning sixteen, and thus hadn’t been able to offer to get her a hellhound.

He cut off the rest of that thought before it could wander into territory he wasn’t comfortable exploring yet. He’d probably have been terrible at actually _raising_ the witchling, anyway, even if the sisters Spellman had been willing to give up their niece on a more permanent basis.

“So, what really happened earlier?” Sabrina asked, looking up from the cat. “I mean...I know you said you got strangled, but...that isn’t what _really_ happened, right? You were just...saying that so Detective Decker wouldn’t suspect you’re...you know...you?”

Lucifer snorted. “Right, because of course, the sensible thing to do when pretending not to be the Devil is to go around _telling_ everyone you’re the Devil, and occasionally faking injuries so nobody believes you.”

“I mean, it seems to be working?”

It was, Lucifer reflected, hard to argue with that.

“I really was strangled, it really could’ve killed me, I got out of it” he rattled off. “The strangler is now in hospital and facing a murder charge for someone _other_ than me, and I don’t even have a sore throat. All in all, a pretty good day.”

He’d probably have a few awkward questions to answer about just how hard he’d kicked Kennedy, but Lucifer was good at dealing with awkward questions, or at least avoiding them until they went away.

Sabrina was gaping at him. “It- You can _die_ ?” she demanded. “I mean...you _said_ you could die, because that's how you went to Hell last time, but...you said ‘very specific circumstances’ were necessary before you actually _did_ it!”

“And so they are! Tonight...just happened to involve some of those circumstances.”

Sabrina’s eyes narrowed. “...you ran into the same ‘very specific circumstances’ twice in a month?”

“ _You_ once had to exorcise two demons in about as many days,” Lucifer reminded her, obscurely proud of that. Granted, two demons shouldn’t have escaped from Hell to bother his daughter two days apart, and possession was definitely off the table, but since one of them had been pre-trapped for her and the other was now undoubtedly facing Lilith’s tender mercies, Lucifer might be persuaded to let that slide just long enough to be suitably impressed.

“That is not anything like the same thing! I just _happened_ to crack the Acheron Configuration that week so Father Blackwood would let me study demonology, which was _such_ bullshit - he kept going on about how it wasn’t ‘safe’ for me or the other students, but I figured out the Acheron Configuration in _days_ when he hadn’t managed it in twenty years, and then the moment we got excommunicated by the Witches’ Council, what’s the first thing Blackwood does? Forbid witches from studying the higher, darker magics because they aren’t what he considers ‘the feminine arts’. Because _that_ isn’t obvious at all!”

Lucifer scowled. “I see when your church decided to just rip off everything Dad was doing, you decided to throw out everything but the sexism and the hierarchies.”

“And the chanting,” Sabrina added. “And the unquestioning obedience…”

Lucifer made a disgusted noise in the back of his throat. “Why bother sticking my name on it, then? Half of Dad’s churches in this country do about the same thing without dragging me into it.”

“The whole ‘automatically condemned to Hell for learning magic’ thing might have something to do with it,” Sabrina reminded him.

“Could be that. Even Amenadiel admits Dad has a tendency to overreact. Still not sure why you listened to this Father Blackwood person, though, since he wasn’t even omnipotent.”

Sabrina snorted. “You haven’t been talking to Ambrose. He’d tell you I never listen to anyone.”

Lucifer couldn’t help his grin at that. She reminded him of...well, no, she didn’t remind him of himself, because he’d done his best to ignore all his doubts and questions and obey for aeons before time was even invented, and here was Sabrina, who’d been questioning parental and religious authority, not knowing they were one and the same, since before she was even old enough to understand half of what she was questioning.

“Girl after my own heart,” he said, rather than try to put any of that into words. “Should I have written you a permission slip or something? ‘Sabrina can do what she wants’?”

Sabrina laughed. “That...would actually have been pretty awesome. Father Blackwood’s _face_ …”

Lucifer had never met Faustus Blackwood, but he could almost picture it himself because, while getting _permission_ to rebel against authority was rather missing the point, the authority figures you were rebelling against having to deal with the idea that they had no way of punishing you for it without getting into trouble themselves was always worth watching.

Sabrina was looking down at the cat again, a little crease between her eyebrows.

“But...you still haven’t answered my question. How often is this going to happen? You getting hurt, and it...it being real?”

“Well, it’s always _real_ ,” Lucifer said, shrugging. “I just normally heal from it a bit faster. I still can, most of the time, as soon as I’m out of the danger zone. I was all healed up by the time I got to you, wasn’t I?”

“I guess? So...what is the danger zone? Is it like...a place? Is it something specific to LA, because if it is, why do you even _live_ here, I mean…”

“Because I’m not about to give up my life here just because occasionally I end up in the same amount of danger as I would if I were human,” Lucifer snapped, not realising until the words were out how much of a bite there was in his voice.

For a moment, fear flickered across Sabrina’s face, but she stood her ground.

“Fine,” she said. “Fine. But- Is that why you chose LA? Because you’re-”

Lucifer rolled his eyes. “I’m not _suicidal_. I’d been here a few years before I started having these outbreaks of inconvenient mortality, and I haven’t died since I found out. Not permanently, anyway.”

“That is not nearly as reassuring a sentence as you seem to think.”

“Nobody else in my life is worried about how often I get into these situations. Including the ones who know what I am. Besides. I’ve always come back.”

Sabrina nodded. “Guess Hell can’t really hold you for long, what with you being King and all,” she said, a little shakily.

Lucifer hummed in his throat, trying not to think of Uriel, and the Hell Loop, and the chances that it would still be waiting for him, if he ever went downstairs again.

“It’s late,” he said instead, “Or early, maybe. Can I assume you got your own room sorted out while you were converting my apartment into the perfect cat-habitat?”

Sabrina rolled her eyes. “I have a _bed_ ,” she said, in tones that suggested that this was all she really needed. “I’ll get everything else unpacked tomorrow.”


	4. In Which Linda Martin Deserves A Pay Rise

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Sabrina meets Linda, and therapy is had.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am not a therapist, nor have I ever attended therapy, so this will be a short chapter due to lack of expertise.

“The Antichrist is real? I mean...you, your family...that’s all real, but- The Antichrist is _alive_ ? _Now_?”

Lucifer rolled his eyes. “You humans and your histrionics! There’s no such thing as the Antichrist! That was just a lot of early Christian bellyaching about the Emperor Nero and his charming hobby of dipping them in tar and using them as human candles. The rest is just Church propaganda.”

Linda looked over at the teenage girl sitting on her sofa. She did not, it had to be said, look particularly demonic.

“Yep, that’s me,” the girl said, smirking. “Antichrist.”

Lucifer groaned. “ _Sabrina_ …”

“The Adversary,” Sabrina went on, smirk widening. “Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast That is Called Dragon, Prince of This World, Spawn of Satan and Lord of Darkness.”

“You’re just making them up now!” Lucifer muttered. “And I’m pretty sure that Adversary one was mine first anyway…”

“I’m sorry,” Linda cut in, “But...if you’re really the- the Antichrist, does that mean…”

She tried, and failed, to find a gesture to encompass the idea of Armageddon, and settled for miming an explosion instead.

“What- Oh, no, no.” Lucifer grinned. “The apocalypse has been called off, due to lack of interest. It was all very anticlimactic.”

“Maybe for _you_ ,” Sabrina muttered.

This was a lot to take in during the first appointment of the day, when she’d only had the one cup of coffee, but Linda did her best.

“I....see. Um. Is that...why you missed our last few sessions?”

“Just the second half,” Sabrina supplied helpfully, “Before that he was in Vegas, doing whatever it is devils do instead of eating ice-cream out of the tub and crying.”

“I bloody was not-”

“And that- It is definitely over? I mean...I haven’t noticed many...uh...I don’t know, krakens, or great beasts or...or freeways bursting into flames recently,”

“Definitely over - never even really got started,” Lucifer supplied. “Can we move on? I keep telling people, if you humans want the world ended, you’re going to need to do it yourselves. Which you _are_ , so...might have misjudged that one.”

Well. That was...terrifying.

Linda closed her eyes, adjusted her glasses, breathed in deeply. “All right. Let’s...put a pin in that.” She was going to need a drink. Possibly several drinks. Another Tribe night sounded good right about now. “What did you want to talk about?”

Lucifer blinked at her. “Well, we’re here for the hellspawn, not me,” he said, sounding quite blank, as if all this should have been obvious. “I’m not an expert on human mental health requirements, but there does seem to be a maximum number of massacres that you people can go through without needing at least some therapy, and that number is one.”

Sabrina groaned, low and heartfelt. “I told you, I’m _fine_. The rest of the coven had it worse - I wasn’t really close to anyone the way my aunties or Nick or Ambrose or the Weird Sisters were…”

“But that doesn’t mean you weren’t affected,” Linda said. She couldn’t quite help it. Antichrist and apocalypse and- and _massacres_ aside...this was what she did. “Why don’t you start by explaining what happened to you? Lucifer, I’d like you to leave.”

He blinked at her, and actually looked startled. “Why?”

“There are...some things that a young woman...might not feel comfortable explaining with her father present. Or any men, really.”

Lucifer cast a questioning look at Sabrina, who looked back, faintly alarmed. “I...uh...it’s fine, he can stay if he wants. I mean, since I don’t even really _need_ …”

“Indulge me,” Linda said, forcing a smile. “It’s usually best, for a first session, if there’s anything you want to talk about that you don’t want getting back to anyone else in your life. Or if there isn’t, but you need to establish that trust first. Of course, if you’d rather have someone present for moral support…”

Sabrina bit her lip. “And- And nobody has to know what I say to you? I mean- You won’t tell anyone?”

“Of course not. Doctor-patient confidentiality is an important part of the process. Nothing said in this room will go any further without your permission.”

“Even if...if what I admit to isn’t...entirely legal?”

“Oh, are we going to talk about the cannibalism?” Lucifer asked, with a sort of brittle brightness in his voice. “I hope you didn’t have breakfast,” he added, looking up at Linda. “It’s rather a gruesome story. Even _I_ felt a bit nervous about eating anything at the Spellmans’ after I found out about that…”

Sabrina snorted. “I hope you realise that you preferring Aunt Hilda’s vegetable pie is _literally_ the stuff of Auntie Zee’s worst nightmares.”

“Of course I bloody preferred it - _she_ wasn’t the one apologising for not being able to offer roast child!”

Linda had had to deal with a lot of deeply weird shit since becoming the Devil’s therapist. Cannibalistic aunts, however, were a new one on her.

“It’s not as though she went around killing and eating small children normally,” Sabrina was saying now. “I told you, Church of Night lore always held that it was the Dark Lord’s favourite. She was just trying to be hospitable!”

“Oh, because that makes it _so_ much better-”

“I’m sorry,” Linda interrupted. “Your aunt offered to _murder a child and feed it to Lucifer?_ ”

Sabrina looked, if anything, even more worried than she had before. “...I don’t know if she’d actually do it,” she said, in a very small voice. “We’re not...we’re not killers. Not most of the time, anyway. Not unless we have to be.”

“Impressing visitors is ‘when you have to be’?” Lucifer muttered.

Sabrina glared at him. “She doesn’t do that for everyone who visits us! Just...you’re a special case. It’s a religious thing.”

“Oh, _right_. So, instead of ‘Lucifer’s coming to dinner, best get the good china out’, it’s ‘Lucifer’s coming to dinner, best hunt down and murder a small human’!”

“More ‘lure in with gingerbread house’, but...basically.” Sabrina grimaced. “It’s...witch culture has a bit of a cannibalism _thing_ , and Auntie Zee is...kind of a fundamentalist…I mean, not on the same level as Father Blackwood was, but…”

“Yes, I _had_ noticed that she wasn’t organising any mass poisonings…”

Linda felt for her desk, and tried not to look as if she was collapsing against it. This had not been anywhere in her training. She was pretty sure that this was not in anyone’s training. Lucifer had been...overwhelming, when she first knew who and what he was, but his problems had been...largely normal, so far. Family issues, the worst self-esteem Linda had ever seen papered over with superficial narcissism and hedonism, and problems with commitment that it was probably going to take the rest of her career to help him work through...but all of that was...expected, and unchanged from when she thought he was just speaking metaphorically.

Nothing had ever led her to expect cannibalism. Or mass poisonings. Or, unless she’d misheard something, _witches_.

“I think,” she said, with a calm she didn’t feel, “You should probably start by explaining what happened while you were away.”

It didn’t help.

Or, it gave Linda a slightly clearer idea of just how out of her depth she really was, because in the space of the first weekend of Lucifer’s time in Greendale - not even the full week - apparently Lucifer had discovered he was being impersonated, learnt he had a daughter, reunited with what sounded like a more serious ex than usual, and helped avert the end of the world, while Sabrina’s parish priest had decided to murder his whole congregation, and that had just been the last highlight of a full year of trauma.

Dentist. She should’ve become a dentist. Dentists didn’t have to deal with this sort of nonsense. _Their_ clients couldn’t talk to them. It was starting to sound like a blessed relief.

“...all right,” she said, groping for something to say that wasn’t screaming. “All right. It sounds as if we’re dealing with two very different sets of issues here. Trauma recovery...isn’t a specialty of mine.” Nor was cult exit counselling, but Sabrina looked as if she’d bolt if Linda brought up that aspect.

“I’m not traumatised!” Sabrina said quickly. “Really. I mean...not that I’m...but I’m not...I wasn’t even in the Desecrated Church. I barely knew anyone who was - I mean, I wasn’t exactly...popular, at the Academy.”

“If you had missed a school shooting because you were home sick that day, you would probably still be traumatised,” Linda said, as calmly as she could manage. “And you would still deserve a space to recover from it. Those were your classmates who died. It’s all right not to be fine after something like that. Lucifer? I’d like to ask you to leave.”

Lucifer’s head snapped around. “What- _Doctor-_!”

“Dad,” Sabrina said quietly. “Please.”

It was amazing, the effect those two words had on Lucifer. He went still for a moment, and then nodded, a little jerkily, all the lines of him somehow softened, the way Linda had only seen him a handful of times before.

“...I’ll wait outside, shall I?” he said, a little too brightly. “I’m sure they’ve got a few decent magazines left - who still _reads_ magazines? People waiting for therapy appointments, I suppose, but frankly I’m amazed _Cosmo_ ’s still in print.”

Sabrina snorted. “You say that like I haven’t found a few copies around the penthouse since I moved in.”

“I read it for the blowjob tips! I like to see how many new ones I’ve inspired since the last edition.”

Sabrina grimaced. “Well, that’s a mental image I’m going to need to gouge my eyes out to get over.”

“You did ask for it, hellspawn,” Lucifer reminded her, smirking. He rose, and made almost to bend over Sabrina. Linda thought, if things had been different, he might’ve dropped a kiss on her fair hair, but as things were, he just brushed a hand over her curls, a little awkwardly, like physical affection was a new language he was still trying to learn and hadn’t quite figured out the grammar for. He cleared his throat, and straightened up, muttering something about how he’d be outside - another change, since Lucifer wasn’t given to repeating himself even when necessary - and closed the door behind him.

Sabrina was still staring down at her clasped hands.

“Before we start,” Linda said gently. “I want to reassure you that nothing you say has to leave this room. I legally cannot tell anyone anything you say to me, in your capacity as my patient, unless you give me permission to do it. That includes your father, or any other members of your family who come asking.”

“Even if it’s illegal?” Sabrina asked, very quietly.

Linda met the girl’s gaze, and forced herself to hold it. “Even then,” she promised. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Very slowly, Sabrina nodded.


	5. In Which Sabrina Auditions For The Role of Stepsister

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Trixie and Sabrina meeting has been one of the biggest requests since this started, so...here you go.

There was a cat in the apartment when Trixie and Maze got in. 

Maze wasn’t technically supposed to be the one picking Trixie up after sleepovers anymore, after whatever she’d said to Mrs Hernandez that had made her go very quiet and then forbid Shawna from having Trixie over again, but she was the one Trixie had called overnight, when the other girls had teased her. Because Maze always came. If she’d called Mommy, she’d have been sympathetic, but sometimes she’d say she was sorry, but Trixie had to stay until morning because Mommy was on a stakeout and there wouldn’t be anyone at home to keep an eye on her. Maze never did that. Sometimes she’d turn up bloody or bruised and there’d be a guy tied up in her car that she had to drop off at the precinct before bringing Trixie home, but she always came, and she never made Trixie talk about it if she didn’t want to. And she came up with the  _ best  _ ideas for payback.

They were plotting out two different revenge plans - the bloody, gory, satisfying one, and the one they’d actually use - when they came into the apartment and found the cat. It was a black cat, a fluffy little shorthair with big green eyes, and Maze’s hackles went up at it on sight.

“...yeah, that’s a goblin,” she said, wrinkling her nose at the cat in distaste. It ignored her, and started calmly washing its ears. “Means the witch is nearby.”

“There is a  _ witch  _ in our  _ apartment _ ?” Trixie hissed, wide-eyed. Looking at the cat...yeah, she could see it as a witch’s cat. And if there was a witch in their apartment, Maze would know. If only Trixie could take her knives to sleepovers! Would knives work on witches?

“Yup,” Maze said, popping the ‘p’. “Lucifer’s little witchling, if we’re going to be exact. This  _ is  _ her cat.”

“Oh.”

It wasn’t like Trixie didn’t  _ know  _ about Sabrina. Nobody had exactly  _ told  _ her that Lucifer was a dad now, and therefore liable to become very boring, in the way of parents everywhere, but she’d found out anyway, because nobody had exactly been trying  _ not  _ to tell her either. But they’d never not said anything about her being a witch, either.

“Maze is that you?” Mommy called, sticking her head out around her bedroom door. “I wasn’t expecting you back before- Trixie?”

Trixie waved, a little shamefaced.

Mommy frowned. “...I told you. Call me first, all right?”

“But you could’ve been busy.”

“But I wasn’t.”

“But you  _ might’ve  _ been.”

Maze shrugged. “I got her home all right, didn’t I? Didn’t even have to threaten the other brat’s parents to get them to hand her over.”

“That’s not the  _ point _ , Maze! Monkey, you know your dad was going to pick you up in the morning.”

“He can pick me up from here!”

Mommy rubbed her face. “...he’s going to have to,” she said, resigned. “Just...call me first, next time, okay?”

“Okay,” Trixie lied. And then, before her mom could take her up on it - her eyes were already narrowing in that way that said she didn’t believe Trixie meant it this time for a moment - “What’s Sabrina doing here? Maze told me,” she added.

Her mom blinked. “Oh. Well...Lucifer is...undercover, for a case, and he couldn’t take Sabrina with him, but he’s not comfortable leaving her alone at Lux. So she’ll be staying with us, until Lucifer gets back. I put her on the air mattress in your room, since you weren’t going to be using it…”

“You put her in my  _ room _ ?” Trixie demanded.

Her room was- It was  _ her  _ room. With her stuffed animals and her sign on the door and the glow-in-the-dark stick-on stars Mommy had helped her put up to replace the painted ones from the house they’d shared with Dad. It was  _ hers _ .

“It was yours or Maze’s, unless I wanted to give up the living room for a few days,” Mommy admitted, in a funny sort of voice that was trying to be reasonable, and failing.

“But-” Trixie started. “It’s  _ mine _ ! I don’t  _ want  _ her in there-”

Mom’s voice sharpened. “Trixie. I know you don’t like people in your room, but Sabrina doesn’t have anywhere else to go.”

“She could sleep on the couch! Or- Or Maze could-”

“Oh, no.” Maze shook her head. “The witchling’s already taken over my old room at Lux, she’s not doing it here too.”

“I heard shouting,” said a new voice, and Trixie looked around.

Sabrina was older than Trixie had expected, nearly grown up, which just made it worse that she was here, taking over Trixie’s room when she could easily be left home alone at Lucifer’s apartment. She was short, too - shorter than both Maze and Mommy - and the sort of really pale white-blonde that teachers tended to sniff at. She was also wearing the single dorkiest pair of striped pyjamas Trixie had ever seen in her life, and knuckling sleep out of her eyes.

She did not look very much like a witch. At least, not the cauldrons-and-black-cats kind of witch that Trixie had been half-expecting. She  _ did  _ look like the sort of witch who might go to Hogwarts and play Quidditch and ride Hippogriffs and were  _ Hippogriffs  _ real? People said the Devil wasn’t real, but Lucifer  _ obviously  _ was, and that meant other things could be too. Like Hogwarts.

“Is Hogwarts real?” she blurted out, staring.

Sabrina blinked. “...no,” she said, with a nervous look at Mommy. “No, Hogwarts isn’t a thing.”

“Oh.”

“ _ But _ ,” Sabrina added, “I  _ did  _ go to a special school back in Massachusetts.”

Trixie brightened. “For witches?”

“And warlocks.” Sabrina said, a little too quickly. “That’s what boy witches are called. Not wizards, those are something else. The headmaster wasn’t nearly as nice, though.”

Trixie felt the grin spread across her face. “ _ Awesome _ ,” she breathed.

Sabrina coughed. “Um...yes. Awesome,” she said, in the tone adults used when talking about something they didn’t think was awesome at all. “So...um....how come you’re home early?”

“I wanted to watch  _ Scooby-Doo _ ,” Trixie explained. “But Em and Crystal said it was for babies. They wanted to watch  _ Thirteen Going On Thirty _ instead, and when I said it was boring, they called me-” she broke off, before she could get to the bit with the biting, and scuffed a foot along the floor.

Sabrina snorted. “Then they are clearly completely wrong. Scooby’s great. I love that show. Hardly watched anything else right up until I was old enough Aunt Hilda let me see horror movies.”

“You weren’t allowed to watch horror movies?” Trixie asked, before clapping her hands over her mouth, because Maze had been  _ very  _ clear that however much Trixie liked Hellraiser, this was another of those don’t-tell-Mommy things, like the knives and Maze’s special face.

“Not for  _ years _ ,” Sabrina said mournfully. “But then the tv movie with the zombies came out, which was pretty close. I always liked it best when the monsters were real.”

Mommy rolled her eyes. “Of course you did,” she said, in that particular exasperated voice that meant she wasn’t annoyed at all, but wasn’t going to say you were being cute, in case it encouraged you. Trixie heard a lot of that particular voice, and by now she knew it by heart.

She went over to Sabrina, “Me too,” she hissed, “Especially that one with the- the box of demons and the wizard...warlock?”

“ _ The Thirteen Ghosts of Scooby-Doo _ ?” Sabrina asked. “It does suffer from a sad lack of Velma, but it also gave us Vincent Van Ghoul, so I can’t complain. Do you have a favourite episode?”

Trixie couldn’t have held back her smile if she tried, bouncing a little in place. “The one where they get transported into the Frankenstein movie! Can we-”

“No,” Mommy said before Trixie could get the rest of the question out. “Even if it isn’t a school night, the rest of us still need to sleep.”

“We could watch it quietly?” Sabrina suggested.

“No.” Mommy rubbed her face. “Trix, you don’t mind if Sabrina shares your room until Lucifer gets back, do you?”

“If he  _ does  _ get back,” Sabrina muttered. She sounded pretty worried about it.

Trixie screwed up her face in thought. It was  _ her  _ room, but...if they were sharing, she could ask more questions. About the not-quite-Hogwarts in Massachusetts, or Scooby-Doo, or if magic was really something you had to be born with, or whether Trixie could learn it too, one day. Maybe, if Trixie made a deal, Sabrina could teach her.

“...I guess she can stay,” she said, still a little grudgingly.

“I promise I don’t snore?” Sabrina said, smiling awkwardly.

Trixie shrugged. “I do. Everyone says so.”

“But it is  _ your  _ room,” Sabrina reminded her, “You’re allowed. It’s guests who have to be on their best behaviour.”

“Is that why Crystal said those things?”

Sabrina wrinkled her nose. “No, for my money that’s just normal bullying.”

“Trix?” Mommy asked, frowning. “What did Crystal say?”

Trixie scuffed a foot across the floor again. She didn’t want to talk about what Crystal said. She didn’t want to  _ think  _ about what Crystal said. “Nothing…” she muttered.

“If it was nothing, then why did it upset you?” Mommy asked, crossing her arms.

It had upset Trixie because it was about her mom, but there was no way she was saying that out loud.

“It just...did?” she tried, without much hope.

Mommy sighed. “Trixie…” she said, sounding very tired. “I can’t  _ make  _ you talk to me…”

That usually meant she was about to try to.

“I’m fine,” Trixie whined, “Really. I know she wasn’t telling the truth.”

She wouldn’t have minded if Crystal  _ was  _ telling the truth, but she made it sound like an awful thing, and that had been the worst part of all. Like Trixie’s family was wrong and terrible and Trixie was a terrible person for liking it so much better now, when her family was so much bigger and stranger and more exciting, than she had when she had a mom and a dad who were together, and a grandmother who visited for the holidays, and that was all.

Mommy looked at her for a few moments more, very intently, then blew out a breath and nodded. “All right. Let’s get you to bed. Did you remember to bring back your toothbrush?”

She had, even if she’d forgotten about it for a second or two, leading to a panicked rummage through her overnight bag before they found it. She’d already been in her pyjamas when Maze picked her up, so it wasn’t long before she was bundled into bed, Sabrina settling down on the air mattress on the floor by Trixie’s bed. She had a stuffed rabbit half-hidden under the blankets, and it made Trixie like her that bit better, even if it wasn’t as objectively cool as Miss Alien.

“Do they have bullies, at witch school?” she said sleepily, into the dark.

Sabrina was quiet for a long moment, and then. “...yes.”

“Oh.” That did make sense. Hogwarts had Malfoy, after all. But… “What did they do?”

Another long pause. “...I...three girls in my dorm locked me in a...special room...all night, the first week I was there,” Sabrina said carefully. “It was pretty scary. But Salem came and found me, so I was all right.”

“Is that your cat?”

“Yes.” Trixie could hear Sabrina’s smile in her voice. “He’s always been able to find me, no matter how much trouble I was in.”

Trixie stared up at the glow-in-the-dark stars. “Did they do anything else?”

“...yes.” Sabrina’s voice was small. “But I can’t tell you about them. It’d give you nightmares.”

Trixie shrugged. “I have Miss Alien. She keeps the nightmares away.”

“Sounds like a good friend to have.”

Trixie bit her lip, then asked, quietly. “What did you do to them? The girls who locked you in?”

Because of course Sabrina had done something. She was Lucifer’s daughter, which made her Maze’s...something...and Trixie couldn’t imagine either of them letting anyone away with anything, if they were hurt.

A very, very long pause, and then.

“I made it so they couldn’t do it to anyone else,” Sabrina said at last. “Now we’re...sort of friends.”

Trixie wrinkled her nose. She couldn’t imagine ever being friends with Crystal again.

“That’s stupid.”

Sabrina laughed. “It probably wouldn’t work for you, unless anyone’s threatening to kill your bullies that I don’t know about. I don’t know...I guess you can’t save someone’s life and still hate each other as much as you did before.”

Like the thing with the troll, in the first  _ Harry Potter _ . Maybe witch school was more like Hogwarts than Sabrina had made it sound.

* * *

Sabrina was already awake by the time Trixie woke up, which was weird, since Trixie had kept being woken up by Sabrina making little noises in her sleep, like she was in pain. Then again, Sabrina had never seemed to wake up herself, unlike Trixie. She wasn’t sure if that was better or worse. Trixie had half wanted to shake her awake once, when Sabrina had been making funny little half-sobbing noises in her sleep, but Salem had been sitting bolt upright on Sabrina’s chest then, and had given Trixie such a look when he caught her looking that she hadn’t quite dared.

Mommy was on the phone when Trixie came out into the kitchen, Sabrina sitting at the counter with a bowl of cereal and dark circles under her eyes.

“-what do you mean, ‘something came up’? Again? Yes, all right, I know you’re trying, but- Because it’s an in-service day! That’s why she was  _ at  _ the sleepover! Yeah. Yeah, I know. I’ll...figure something out. Okay. Bye.”

It hadn’t happened as often lately, but Trixie knew what that meant.

“Daddy’s not coming?” she asked, resigned.

Mommy shook her head. “Something came up. He says he can pick you up afterwards, though, and then you’ll stay with him until Monday.” She raked a hand through her hair and huffed a breath. “Looks like I’m going to have to ask Olga if she can make time…”

“I could watch her,” Sabrina chimed in. “I mean, if you want. Not like I’ve got anything else to do.”

Mommy frowned. “...you’re sure?” she asked.

“Sure.” Sabrina shrugged, “Like I said, I don’t really know anyone in LA, and there isn’t much to do on my own. Besides. Your kid’s pretty cool.”

“I’m still here,” Trixie said, a little sourly, even if Sabrina  _ had  _ called her cool.

Sabrina looked around at her. “I know. Do you want your usual sitter, or will I do?”

Trixie considered it. “...can we watch  _ Scooby-Doo _ ?”

Sabrina grinned. “The Thirteen Ghosts thereof?”

“I mean...it’s good, but I missed an episode of the new one. And I want to know what the Planispheric Disc is for.”

“I’m going to have to get caught up, but sure. I haven’t seen new Scooby-Doo since  _ Zombie Island _ \- Greendale’s a bit...behind...sometimes.”

Mommy nodded. “Thanks, Sabrina. Monkey, can I count on you to behave?”

“Yes, mommy,” Trixie said, crossing her fingers behind her back more for the sake of doing it than because she was really planning to misbehave. Mommy gave her a faintly suspicious look, then turned to Sabrina to rattle off the usual list of rules, just as if she were any other new babysitter.

“-if anything goes seriously wrong, my number’s inside the cupboard over the sink,” Mommy finished. “And now, I gotta go. Thanks again, Sabrina. Bye, Monkey.”

A quick kiss on top of the head, and then Trixie and Sabrina and Salem were alone in the apartment.

The moment Mommy was gone, Trixie pounced.

“So, if you’re a witch, can you do some magic? Now?”

Sabrina shrugged, throwing herself down on the sofa and letting Salem climb up on her chest. “I might,” she said. “What did you have in mind?”

Trixie pondered, then her eyes fell on the DVD sitting on top of the television.

“Can you turn people into frogs?”

“Yes,” Sabrina paused. “Turning them back is trickier.”

“Can you show me?”

Sabrina blinked. “...who on? We’re the only people in the apartment, and I’m pretty sure you don’t want to be a frog.”

Trixie put her head on one side. “Why not?”

Being a frog actually sounded pretty neat. She could hop around the apartment, see how that tongue thing worked, maybe find out what breathing underwater felt like…

“Because,” Sabrina said, in a long-suffering sort of voice. “Your  _ brain  _ turns into a frog’s too. You wouldn’t even be able to properly remember it, and you’d keep trying to catch flies on your tongue for a day or two after. It’s pretty funny, actually, so long as it’s happening to someone else.”

“Oh.” Trixie said, and didn’t pout, no matter what Mommy called it. “...can you fly?”

“On a broomstick.”

“Does it need to be a special broomstick like in  _ Harry Potter _ ?”

Sabrina blinked, “No, any old broom works. It’s still me doing the magic.”

“So why’s it have to be a broom? Could you use a vacuum cleaner or something?”

Sabrina frowned. “...tradition, I guess,” she said, sounding faintly confused. “Huh. All those traditions I kept questioning, and I never considered that one.”

Trixie bit her lip. “We have a vacuum?” she whispered, leaning in.

Sabrina grinned, and for the first time, Trixie could see the resemblance between her and Lucifer.

“Let’s give it a try.”

* * *

By the time Dad got there that afternoon, they’d managed to fix most of the damage. Sabrina, it turned out, had absolutely no compunctions about using magic to repair the two broken windows and put everything back in more-or-less the right place, including the very thoroughly disenchanted vacuum cleaner.

After that, by mutual agreement, they really had settled down to watch Scooby-Doo, with Trixie providing explanations for the backstory and why the Planispheric Disc mattered so much. And, after they’d got to the end of the season, they’d made a card for Lucifer, who was apparently in hospital, but all right, since he was only there undercover. Trixie had given up three of her emoji stickers from Christmas for the card, and one of her spaceship stickers for the envelope, and was feeling pretty proud of the finished project.

They were debating the relative merits of watching  _ Zombie Island  _ versus  _ The Cyber Chase _ next, when there came a knock at the door.   
“Think that’s your dad?” Sabrina asked, looking up.

Trixie nodded.

“Then you’d better get your shoes on. At least you don’t need a coat in this weather.”

Trixie rolled her eyes - it wasn’t  _ that  _ hot out - but went to get her shoes anyway while Sabrina got the door.

“...you’re not Olga,” she heard her dad’s voice saying outside.

“No, I’m not,” Sabrina agreed. “We met at the precinct. Detective Espinoza, right?”

“...right. And you’re...Lucifer’s kid. Katrina?”

“Sabrina,” Sabrina corrected. “Spellman. Trixie’s just getting ready.”

“Right.” Trixie was doing up the velcro when she heard him ask. “So...how are you finding LA? Lucifer treating you okay?”

Trixie couldn’t see Sabrina’s face as she replied. “Yeah. He’s...not what I expected. But that’s good. I mean- I like it here. It gets a bit lonely, but…”

“No, I get it. Must be a big adjustment.”

“It...has been. A bit. But I’m getting used to it.”

“Good. That’s...that’s good.”

There was a long, awkward pause as Trixie did up her other shoe.

“So...what were you expecting?”

This time, Trixie saw Sabrina shrug as she came up behind her. “Oh, you know. Horns, cloven hooves, blood sacrifices, the usual…”

Dad grimaced. “I see he’s already got you in on his whole devil theme.” His eyes slid over to Trixie. “Hey, Trix. Ready to go?”

“Yup!” Trixie said, unsticking a sticker from her hair and moving it to her cheek.

“Ok.” Dad looked back at Sabrina, “Thanks for watching her.”

Sabrina smiled. “Oh- It was no trouble. We had a good time. Right, Trixie?”

Trixie nodded. “Will you come back? We didn’t watch  _ The Cyber Chase _ ...”

“I maintain that _ Zombie Island  _ is a classic, but...sure. I’ll come back. If you want me to.”

Trixie beamed at her, and reached up to hug Sabrina around the middle. She didn’t hug the way Lucifer did, going stiff and awkwardly patting at Trixie’s shoulder. Mom said that was because not many people  _ had  _ hugged Lucifer before, not even his own parents, and suggested that Trixie ask first, next time. No, Sabrina hugged back like someone who had been getting hugs all her life, even if she didn’t seem to know what to do with how much shorter than her Trixie was.

“So,” Dad said, once they’d said their goodbyes and were in his car. “You and Sabrina seem to get along pretty well.”

“She’s  _ magic _ ,” Trixie half-whispered, giddy with it.

Dad sighed. “...of course she is,” he said, resigned.


	6. In Which Music Is The Best Way To Avoid Admitting Feelings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I was given a prompt for Lucifer and Sabrina singing together to celebrate the new trailer. This...is not exactly that, but it's about as close as I could get without descending into outright songfic.

It was Lucifer who raised the subject first, when Sabrina caught him at the piano and halfway into an unsurprisingly vehement rendition of ‘From Eden’. She’d heard him sing before, of course - he held court in the club every night, and Sabrina generally spent the early part of the evening down there, before the club started filling up and the DJ arrived to start the heavier clubbing part of the night. Sabrina wasn’t much for clubbing - she didn’t mind it, exactly, but it was the sort of activity more easily enjoyed in a group, and Cousin Montgomery and her set’s take on clubgoing was a bit wilder than Sabrina knew what to do with, and all her actual friends were back on the East Coast. Still, it felt different, up here, with no crowd to play to, when he so obviously hadn’t meant her to catch him.

“You know,” she said, leaning on the piano, because making a joke had always been easier than talking frankly. “If you’re trying to convince me you aren’t moping, it’s not working.”

Lucifer shot her a look. “The Devil does not _mope_ ,” he said sourly.

“Would you rather I use another word for it? You’re about half a step from breaking out the ice-cream and break-up songs.”

“This from the witch who’s spent all week listening to Kelly Clarkson and laying waste to my freezer?”

Sabrina shrugged. She didn’t want to think about Nick. “Takes one to know one. And at least _I_ had an actual break-up to mope about, rather than just getting cold feet before I started anything.”

“I didn’t get cold feet! I just- You know why I broke things off.”

“Yes,” Sabrina said, trying not to roll her eyes. “I still say you’re an idiot.”

“Your lack of faith wounds me terribly, hellspawn. Do you play at all?”

Sabrina blinked, thrown by the abrupt change of subject. “What?”

“Piano,” Lucifer said helpfully. “I’m given to understand it’s usual for parents to subject their children to lessons whether they want to learn or not…”

Sabrina snorted. “Yeah, not so much. I had singing lessons, though? Auntie Zee was the director of the Satanic Choir at the Academy of Unseen Arts for a while, so she was pretty keen that I get in.”

“Is there _anything_ you people didn’t rip off from Dad’s followers?” Lucifer asked, rolling his eyes.

“The whole universal love and forgiveness thing?” Sabrina suggested. “Not a big priority in the Church of Night.”

“Or anywhere else I’ve seen,” Lucifer put in darkly. “I’ve met perhaps one priest who lived up to any of that, and he died for it.”

“Well, you _were_ in Hell for most of human history,” Sabrina reminded him. “I’m going to bet it’s pretty hard to meet the love-and-forgiveness type down there.”

Lucifer gave a noncommittal sort of hum, and looked down at the keys for a long moment, before looking back up at Sabrina with the most forced smile she’d ever seen on him.

“So,” he said, with deliberate brightness, “What sort of thing gets sung by a Satanic choir, then?”

“Mostly showtunes, during Aunt Zelda’s tenure. I think Lady Blackwood preferred the traditional chants, because she and Auntie Zee got into a terrible row about having the choir sing ‘The Lonely Goatherd’ when I was ten. I think that was the only time I ever heard them fight while Lady Blackwood was still alive.”

Lucifer grimaced. “Of _course_ she’s a fan of that musical. And _goats_ , _again_. Whoever founded your church must have had a fixation.”

“You’re not? A fan, I mean.” She had to admit, it hadn’t seemed likely, but she couldn’t help but grin at the faces he made at the suggestion.

“Dad likes it,” Lucifer said shortly, which was really answer enough, except for all the ways in which it really wasn’t.

“The False God is into Rodgers and Hammerstein?”

Lucifer rolled his eyes. “There’s nothing false about him, unless you’re referring to his personality, but yes. Amenadiel is too, but he’d follow Dad in anything.”

“...right.” Sabrina looked down at the piano, running a hand over the keys nearest her, even if she couldn’t play a note. “It was how I met Nick. In choir class. He said that was what- what got him interested. Before Baphomet...you know.” He’d been the only living person, the whole of that first weekend at the Academy, who’d even tried to be nice to her. And she’d been so grateful, she’d never questioned it.

“Before he got drafted into forcing you to play your part in my impostor’s twisted little pseudo-incest fantasy?” Lucifer supplied, his voice hard.

Sabrina nodded. “Yeah. Before that. And I know- I know he didn’t have a choice-”

“Well, there’s always a choice, hellspawn. The alternatives might not be appealing, but they’re always there.”

“I know.” Sabrina shook her head. “I mean...I can’t talk, I didn’t stand up to him either, when he started coming after me. Maybe Nick was just smart enough to know he wasn’t going to win…”

“Never the family strong point,” Lucifer said dryly, with the odd look he got sometimes when he said things like that, half delighted and half astonished, with something rueful creeping in around the edges. “But he can surely make his own excuses. Whether or not you accept them is up to you.”

“I want to forgive him,” Sabrina said, hating that it was true. “I want to. I just- I can’t. Not yet. Maybe not ever. And even if I do forgive him...how do I trust him, after that?”

“I’m probably the wrong person to ask,” Lucifer admitted. “Lacking experience and all.”

Sabrina shot him a look. “You really suck at this.”

“Again, inexperience,” Lucifer said - very lightly, but there was something odd in his voice. It was the tone he’d got after the article, the one that had come out after that one night Sabrina had spent clubbing with Montgomery and her set, that had alleged everything from neglect to outright cruelty to explain Sabrina’s decisions that night. The paparazzo responsible would likely never work in journalism again after Lucifer was through with him, and Sabrina couldn’t even care.

Sabrina sighed. “...you don’t really,” she muttered, “I just- What am I supposed to do next?”

Lucifer shrugged. “Forgive him, or don’t. Whichever you choose, you don’t need to decide now, and you don’t need to justify it, to me or him or yourself or anyone else. In the meantime...well, ice-cream and break-up songs are a cliche, but if it works…”

Sabrina sighed. “I think I already finished the last tub of ice-cream,” she admitted. “And if I listen to one more break-up song, I think I’ll do something stupid like drunkenly call my ex at one in the morning or something. Which wouldn’t be fair on me _or_ Harvey.”

“I thought this was about Nick.”

“It was! I just-” Sabrina shook her head. “It’s been...a wild year, all right?”

Lucifer was looking again with the blank look he got when she was being more than usually confusing, and she sighed and looked down at the piano, fingers still moving restlessly over the keys.

“Well,” Lucifer said after a moment, “If you don’t want to _listen_ to any more breakup songs…”

His hands were already moving, picking out the first few bars of something jaunty and upbeat, and Sabrina snorted when she recognised the tune.

“ _South Pacific_ , really?”

“You _did_ say you mostly knew musicals,” Lucifer reminded her. “And...well. It’d be a shame to go back to your choir out of practice, wouldn’t it?”

Sabrina gave him a sideways look. “...why do I suddenly get the feeling you have an ulterior motive for this?”

“Because literally everyone you have ever interacted with has had at least three ulterior motives at any given time?”

“Not everyone I knew,” Sabrina protested, “Roz and Harvey and Theo…”

“Everyone has _some_ sort of ulterior motive, hellspawn. It might not be harmful, but it’s always there.”

She couldn’t imagine going through life thinking that way, but...well, he wasn’t wrong. Even the people she loved best had had plans within plans, and she’d known none of them. But she couldn’t say any of that, and...well. It had been a while since she’d sung, what with everything that had happened before she left Greendale. It’d be nice to have a hobby again. One that didn’t have anything to do with the end of the world.

She hopped up onto the piano, and shrugged at Lucifer’s raised eyebrow.

“I always wanted to do the Helen Morgan routine.” She paused, and then. “Uh...this isn’t going to break the piano, is it?”

“It takes a lot more than that to break a piano, hellspawn. You can actually dance on top of the upright ones.”

Sabrina blinked. “You’ve _tried_ that?”

“I’ve tried everything once. Well, everything worth trying, anyway.” Lucifer gestured to the keys. “Is there something you’d like me to play, or…”

Sabrina grinned. “We can stick with the musicals, since we’re on a theme.”

‘I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out Of My Hair’ was both on the nose and from a movie Sabrina had never really liked, but it was catchy enough, and she knew all the words to it, and by the second chorus Lucifer had joined in with her.

She broke off, laughing, before they got to the end of the third verse.

“I don’t think this song suits you. I mean- You don’t _actually_ want to wash Chloe out of anything, do you?”

Lucifer blinked, his hands stilling on the keys. “Well, we’re not talking about me-”

“Now, there’s a first!”

“And as for the Detective, that’s…” he shook his head. “Why _are_ you suddenly so invested in my relationships?”

Sabrina shrugged. “I like Chloe,” she said. “She gets it. And I can’t keep your ego under control all on my own.”

Besides. It made him...that bit more human. That bit more someone she could deal with on an equal level. Made it easier to think of him as just...Lucifer Morningstar, the eccentric nightclub owner who’d come into her life just recently, and wanted to be a dad to her now he could. It widened the gap between ‘Lucifer’ and ‘the Dark Lord’ in Sabrina’s mind, that he had a Chloe in his life, and maybe that wasn’t fair on anyone, but there it was.

She forced a grin, and poked Lucifer’s arm with her foot. “Do you know anything by the Ronettes?” she asked, feigning nonchalance.

Lucifer didn’t look convinced, but he smiled back, all teeth, and if it was as fake as Sabrina’s own...well. It hadn’t been that long. They could work on it.


	7. In Which Sabrina Becomes Tribe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So, this one took me a bit longer than usual, and it's a bit rambling, but...well, it's a night of fun heavily based off my experiences of tagging along for an aunt's hen night when I was in my teens, so...not surprising.

It was Chloe who had invited Sabrina along for a ‘Tribe Night’, whatever one of those was, and Sabrina was pretty sure she’d only done it because after the _last_ time Sabrina went clubbing, it was hard to argue the need for adult supervision. She didn’t really mind. The night out with Montgomery and her friends had been...wild, and not in a good way. She’d been lucky to still be coherent enough to call home when she did. And she liked Maze and Ella and Linda and Chloe much better than Montgomery and her coven in any case. And, because it was the one place in the city that would both let Sabrina in and give them discounted drinks, that meant spending the evening at Lux.

“You know,” Sabrina said, taking a sip of her cocktail and grimacing at the sweetness - _why_ had Lucifer cut her off the absinthe? - “I’m pretty sure parental supervision is missing the point.”

Ella snorted. “Yeah. I did not picture Lucifer as the hovering type. I mean, didn’t see him as the parenting type in general, but if I had...wouldn’t have pegged him for a hoverer.”

“There’s only one person Lucifer wants to peg him,” Maze said flatly, making Ella snort half her pina colada out her nose and Sabrina gag a little on her next sip of over-sweet raspberry vodka and grenadine. “We going to talk about my ex-boss all night, or are we going to have some actual fun?”

“No work talk, no sex talk,” Ella agreed, “Doctor Linda’s rules for a successful girls’ night.”

“Where is she, anyway?” Sabrina asked, craning her neck to see over the crowd. “The line for the bathroom isn’t _that_ long. If she isn’t back in fifteen minutes, I’m legally allowed to finish her tequila.”

“Pretty sure drinking age is still a thing, kid,” Ella said, reaching over to ruffle Sabrina’s hair. Sabrina pouted. “What’s that you’re drinking, anyway, a Shirley Temple?”

“Sure,” Sabrina lied. She stared mournfully down into the glass. “It’s very...sweet.”

Ella raised her eyebrows. “Guessing you are not all about the sweet things, huh?”

“I like absinthe. You drink that with sugar.”

She hadn’t actually tried that many other alcohols, because Aunt Hilda had a rule about underage drinking in the house, none of the bars in Greendale would serve a minor and at the Gray Room, she’d ordered absinthe mostly because it fit the aesthetic of a smoky Victorian decadent bar. She was, however, pretty sure that she was never going to order a Shirley Bend Over again. Or any of the other surprisingly lethal, pastel-coloured cocktails Montgomery had kept pressing on her during their night out. Too sweet, and too potent, and far too easy to spike.

“That’s the insanely strong liquorice-tasting green stuff, right? _Respect_ , that stuff’s hardcore, but I’m also pretty sure the drinking age is a federal law.”

“It’s a _stupid_ federal law!” Sabrina said sullenly.

“-and since you’re out with two cops. Well, one cop and one crime scene tech, but still. And a bounty hunter. Either way, getting busted for underage drinking is not a good way to end a Tribe Night!”

“I’m not going to get busted. Like you said, it’s only a Shirley Temple.”

Ella gave her what Aunt Zelda would’ve called an old-fashioned look. It wasn’t quite as good as Auntie Zee’s, which might as well have had dinosaurs in it, but it was still pretty impressive.

“You think I don’t know that trick?”

Maze snorted, “Woman cannot live on ginger ale alone, Lopez. Sooner the kid learns to drink, the sooner I’m off babysitting duty.”

“Still don’t need a babysitter!”

Ella nudged her. “Shut up, I was an _awesome_ babysitter.”

“You did threaten to tase my uncle,” Sabrina agreed, smirking. It hadn’t really been necessary. Amenadiel had just wanted to find out if she really did exist, and if she really was what Lucifer said she was. Still, after the ordeal that was meeting the Goddess, Sabrina had needed the reassurance. She’d fought angels before, or...something angel-like, anyway...but Amenadiel was higher up the ladder than the hunters who’d come to Greendale had ever been, and Sabrina had been afraid. And Ella had threatened him with a _taser_.

“You said your grandma probably sent him! And also that she actually, _literally_ wanted to murder you.”

“She does,” Maze put in.

Sabrina groaned. “Can we put a pin in the family history? It’s...kind of a mess. Not even a hot mess. A lukewarm, unappetising mess that’s been reheated far, far too often and is now pretty much inedible.”

“What’s inedible?”

Sabrina looked around, to see Chloe standing there with an old-fashioned in one hand and the other arm crossed over her chest.

“My family,” Sabrina said, shrugging. “Unless it’s ritualistic, in which case, they might get offended if you _don’t_ cannibalise them.”

It felt...good, somehow, to be able to joke about that, and have Ella choke on her drink with laughter, and Chloe roll her eyes in the way Sabrina had come to learn meant she was exasperated but resigned to Spellman-Morningstar family drama. It made the whole thing that bit less of a nightmare. The Feast of Feasts was over, was never coming back if Sabrina had anything to say about it, and now she could shrink it down to a fun one-liner over drinks, and say no more of it. Linda would doubtless analyse that, if Sabrina brought it up to her, but that was something for their next session.

“I mean,” Ella said, mopping up spilt pina colada with a napkin, “I guess there is precedent. I mean, everyone’s made the ‘Eucharist as cannibalism’ joke at least once. Damn, method acting is just a Morningstar family _thing_ , isn’t it?”

Sabrina shrugged. “I’m basically a theatre kid at heart,” she agreed. “Wouldn’t really call myself ‘method’, though.”

“Oh, cool,” Ella said brightly. “What about you two?” she added, looking around at Maze and Chloe. “Or- Should we wait for Linda, to have the full set of high school experiences?”

“No need.” Chloe shrugged. “I didn’t really get much of a high school experience. Child actor and all. I mostly had private tutors on set.”

“I was born of Lilith to torment the wicked in the pits of Hell,” Maze said bluntly. “High school wasn’t really a thing back then. Though I think my mother would have approved of it. Reliving high school is a common torment in some parts of Hell.”

Sabrina’s smirk widened. “Yeah, did I ever mention Maze’s mom was one of my teachers at Baxter High?”

Ella winced. “Teacher’s kid. No wonder you don’t want to talk about it. Me,” she added, taking a sip of her own ridiculous cocktail. “I got into a _lot_ of trouble when I was younger. I mean, I was a nerdy kid, but I don’t know if I’d have paid as much attention to my grades if Rae- If this friend of mine hadn’t kept encouraging me to stick with the science-nerd thing and not go hog wild.”

“I’d like to see you go wild,” Maze muttered, taking a pull of beer. “Hey, Decker, seen Linda anywhere?”

“I think she was getting a fresh drink last time I saw her,” Chloe said, looking around.

Sabrina rolled her eyes. “Who’d try anything at Lux? The last person who tried it is probably still gibbering. Anyway, we were here with her original drink the whole time.” She paused, and then. “...so...guessing this means she’s not going to finish that?”

“Nope,” Chloe said, picking up Linda’s cosmopolitan with the hand not occupied with her own old-fashioned. “ _You’re_ a minor, and that Shirley you’re drinking had better be clean.”

Sabrina pouted. “Mortals,” she muttered. “Dad would let me have whiskey.”

Chloe’s eyes narrowed. “Would he.” She looked over her shoulder at where Lucifer was holding court on the other side of the club. He caught her eye and waved. Sabrina rolled her eyes, and looked down at her drink as Chloe glared back at him. It had the unmistakable feeling of being co-parented, and it was difficult not to smirk at the way the exchange made two of the crowd who had been flirting with Lucifer remove their hands and draw back to a more reasonable conversational distance.

“What did I miss?”

That was Linda’s voice. She’d acquired a new drink - something thick and pale and topped with chocolate that Sabrina didn’t recognise, despite Patrick the bartender’s attempts to teach her about cocktails during the slower part of the evening - and was looking slightly harried.

“Chloe keeps trying to regulate my alcohol intake,” Sabrina said breezily. “I’m at home, I’ve got parental supervision, I’m about as safe it’s possible for me to be! And I’m _still_ drinking a _Shirley Temple_ ,” she added, in revulsion, pushing the glass away. “Someone needs to come up with better mocktails.”

“Alcohol woes aside,” Linda said, dropping into the booth beside Maze, “This is your first tribe night, so we might as well start out the traditional way-”

“We have _traditions_ now?” Chloe interjected.

Linda didn’t even miss a beat. “Each of us says one thing about ourselves that no-one else in the group knows. Here, I’ll go first. I...actually used to cheerlead in high school.”

Ella raised her eyebrows. “Full house. We were just swapping stories about that - you know Maze’s mom was a teacher?”

Linda blinked. “...she was?”

“She was my high school English teacher for the last year,” Sabrina supplied. “Filling in for my favourite teacher, actually. Of course, she was also a scheming witch who wanted to literally destroy the world, but…”

“...right.” Linda took a gulp of her drink. “This has to do with…”

“Yeah.”

Linda nodded, and then looked around at the rest of the group. “So, who wants to go next?”

“Ooh, me!” Ella bounced in her seat. “So, this one time in high school, I was at this wedding - my brother was an altar boy, and- Oh, wow.” She looked around at them, snickering. “Whole room goes quiet. It really wasn’t a big thing, you guys! It was just...something boring he had to do on weekends, and he missed it half the time anyway. I get none of you were brought up religious, but…”

“I was,” Sabrina put in.

Ella blinked at her. “No kidding. Your dad goes around saying he’s the Devil, and you’re religious?”

“ _I’m_ not,” Sabrina corrected, “And it’s not really the same religion - my family are...we’re kind of Satanist?” 

Ella’s jaw dropped. “...no kidding?”

Sabrina nodded. “Yeah. Bit of a nasty shock for them when Dad showed up.”

“Like...LaVeyan Satanists, or…”

“Nope, full-on devil-worshippers.” Sabrina grinned awkwardly. “I was...never that into it. I mean, Aunt Zelda was always the devout one of the family. I just celebrated the holidays and went to the odd ritual.” She paused, and then. “Uh. I didn’t really talk about it much, back home. Small town, you know? I mean, even here in LA, it’s not…”

“Yeah, no, I get it. I mean, not my thing, but...damn.” Ella shook her head. “But- Okay. Religious tolerance. I mean, I always did think the Devil got a bad rap. And that was _before_ I met Lucifer. So - ok, your religion, your business.”

“It’s not _my_ religion,” Sabrina said hastily. “Dad’s ego is enough trouble without actively worshipping it. So, what happened with the wedding?”

Quite a lot, as it turned out, which started with the lab rat Ella had rescued from a high school science department escaping her pocket in the middle of the ceremony and ended with a full-on meltdown on the part of the groom.

Even Sabrina, whose last experience of weddings involved political assassination, faking a haunting to disrupt the wedding, and Father Blackwood getting declared antipope, even if only on an interim basis, had to admit that sounded like a pretty unqualified disaster.

“Okay,” Ella said, once everyone had got their breath back and most of them had stopped snickering. “So, whose turn is it now?”

“I don’t actually miss tormenting the guilty in Hell as much as I thought I would,” Maze said, out of the blue. “But torture up here has even more rules than it did down there. People have to _want_ it.” They all stared at her. Maze scowled. “What? I can do depth.”

“I don't even know where to start reacting to that, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t count as a proper confession,” Chloe said.

Linda shoved her lightly, “Respect other people’s metaphors,” she said, sounding exasperated now. Sabrina snorted. _Metaphors_. Sure.

“So, is it my turn?” she asked. “Because if Maze is allowed to talk about Hell, I’m going to talk about that one time I banished a sleep demon that neither of my aunts could contain.”

“Your aunts do that LARPing stuff with you?” Chloe asked, eyebrows going up.

Sabrina shrugged. “Family bonding is important. Or so Doctor Linda keeps telling me.”

“Ah-ah!” Ella wagged a finger. “No work talk. You LARP?”

Sabrina shifted uneasily. She did not, in fact, LARP. She only knew what LARPing was because Harvey had talked about it a few times, and it had sounded like a pretty solid excuse.

“...a bit,” she lied. “I mean, we’re...probably doing it all wrong, since nobody else in Greendale does and we didn’t really know what we were doing, but…”

Ella raised both hands in a quelling gesture. “Woah, I’m going to stop you there, because there is no right or wrong way to LARP.” She smacked the table. “You know what - we should try it sometime! I mean, it’s not that big a step from Maze’s whole demon thing already? Just...less full-time. I used to have a group back in Detroit, but since I moved to LA...not so much. It’s hard to find friends you can do that with, you know? And if you try to join a local group you always kinda feel like you’re crashing someone else’s party…”

“No LARPing,” Chloe said firmly, “I gave up acting for a reason.”

“It wasn’t lack of talent,” Sabrina blurted out, before realising what she’d said and wishing she had something tolerable to drown her sorrows in.

Chloe blinked at her. “Please tell me Lucifer didn’t show you-”

“What- No, I mean…” Sabrina shifted. “I...might’ve seen a few of your old Disney Channel movies from the nineties, back when I was a kid. I didn’t know it was _you_!”

Maze’s eyebrows did something comical. “...you did other movies?”

“Well...yeah.” Chloe looked around at them, and sighed. “Look, contrary to popular belief, playing some dumb high schooler who takes her top off on camera isn’t the sort of role you go into the acting business looking for. I’d been getting parts in schmaltzy kids’ films since I was twelve.”

Ella whistled. “Damn. When I was twelve, I think I was still biting psychiatrists and getting ‘doesn’t apply herself’ comments on my grade reports.”

“You _bit_ your psychiatrist?” Linda asked, looking quite understandably alarmed by this unexpected threat to life and limb.

“It was a school counsellor, and...yeah. Not my proudest moment.” Ella grimaced, and took a sip of her pina colada. “So, how come nobody ever mentions your other movies?”

“Not like I was ever the _star_ or anything.” Chloe shrugged. “They were cheesy made-for-TV movies, and I missed the explosion of the Disney Channel in the early 2000s. _Hot Tub High School_ was...an attempt to break away from those sorts of roles, I guess. Show people I wasn’t a kid anymore by...behaving about as immaturely as I could.”

“And I do believe that’s one new fact from everyone!” Linda said, raising her glass in celebration. “Ladies, we have reached our bonding target!”

There was a general clinking of glasses.

“I’m still holding out for a blood pact, though,” Maze said, once they’d finished.

“I think we need more specialised equipment for that,” Sabrina said, and shrugged. “Or- Are there different rules, when one of the participants is a demon? I couldn’t bring any of my ritual knives through airport security.”

“Less blood pacts, more karaoke,” Chloe said firmly. “Or- They don’t do karaoke here.”

“Not really a ‘karaoke’ joint, no,” Maze agreed, taking another pull of beer. “We can find somewhere that is.”

“What about-”

“The kid knows how to get into places!”

“You remember what happened last time-”

“Hey,” Sabrina interrupted. “ _That_ happened because Montgomery is an ice-cold _bitch_ who thought it was funny to see me like that and figured I made a good decoy. Since none of you are about to do that...I hope…”

“We aren’t,” Ella answered, looking _mortally_ offended, “I am pretty sure that is the _opposite_ of being Tribe.”

Maze nodded. “Yeah. And since you won’t let us hunt that bitch down for you…”

“Trust me,” Sabrina said darkly, taking a sip of her Shirley and for once not wincing at the taste. “I can deal with Cousin Montgomery.”

Choe shot her a look, but nodded. “All right, then. Let’s find a karaoke bar.”

The one they found catered mostly to the college crowd, but it had an open bar and Sabrina knew she could wheedle Maze into buying her the good stuff. Maze had declared the day they met that it was her bound duty as the coolest of Sabrina’s aunts to ensure that Sabrina knew how to drink, and how to know if something was worth drinking, and she couldn’t do that if Sabrina was stuck on mocktails all night.

Unfortunately, Chloe caught them at it after she got back from taking her turn at the karaoke machine - a fairly spirited rendition of Queen’s ‘You’re My Best Friend’ that showed off to anyone who had any doubts that Chloe Decker’s singing voice had not gone the way of her squeaky-clean adolescent image - to find Sabrina ignoring her own luridly-coloured mocktail in favour of Maze’s second finger of whiskey.

“I swear, it has to be some kind of predisposition,” she muttered, putting the glass to one side and giving Sabrina a very stern look. “You do know that it’s not...not safe to drink the way your dad does, right? He’s my best friend, but he’s got a problem, and I’d rather not see you pick it up.”

Sabrina scowled. “I just want _one_ drink. Just one.”

“You’ve had one.” Chloe raised an eyebrow, “Or did you think I believed you weren’t cheating back at Lux?”

Sabrina sat up, indignant. “You mean I wasted my time getting something I could pass off as a mocktail when I could’ve had something less…” she tried to find a word, but apparently the look on her face said enough. “Besides,” she added moodily, as Linda and Maze went up to take their turn - jointly, since Maze had found a duet she wanted to try - “All the non-alcoholic drinks are just too sweet for me. And I can’t exactly order a coffee at a place like this.”

“There’s iced tea on the board,” 

Sabrina considered for a few moments the face Ambrose would make at the very suggestion that iced tea was an acceptable beverage under any circumstances, ever, and decided this was probably a point in its favour.

“Fine,” she sighed.

Great. She couldn’t have felt like more of a kid if she’d tried. Montgomery and her friends - if you could really call them ‘friends’, considering - had been overwhelming and slightly terrifying in a way that had just made her feel small, and that had _rankled_. But however much they’d made her feel she had to prove to them, they’d been...peers, roughly. Now, she was painfully aware of being the only kid at the grown-ups table, and even if she liked the company better, it wasn’t an easy feeling.

“I feel you, kid,” Ella said, nudging Sabrina, “Kinda feels like a waste of a night out, right? But getting wasted - take it from me, that’s not the point, okay? It’s just...a way of getting to the point where singing karaoke in public is fun and not an unspeakable nightmare.”

Chloe gave a quick, shocked laugh, “Wow. I did _not_ picture you for the stage fright type.”

“Such are the wonders of alcohol,” Ella said, raising her glass, “But, seriously, don’t feel pressured, all right? Nobody’s making you go up on that stage.”

“Maze might,” Sabrina said, just for the sake of saying it. Currently, Maze was belting out an eighties power ballad with an arm slung around Linda’s shoulders and her drink in the other hand, but she’d be back once the song was over, and Maze was a firm believer in not doing anything by halves.

“Hey,” Chloe put a hand on her shoulder, “No pressure. That’s important. You don’t want to go up there, you don’t go up there.”

Sabrina smiled. She couldn’t really help it. “Thanks. That’s...that’s great. Really. But I’m not...I don’t mind. I mean...theatre kid, remember? Stage fright...not a big problem for me.” She glanced up at the stage, and revised that assessment. “...maybe not on my own, though.”

Chloe nodded. “Okay. We can work with that. Ella, you want to take a turn with Sabrina?”

“Oh, no.” Ella shook her head. “I am not _nearly_ buzzed enough for that yet. In fact, I’m just gonna go grab a few more of these before I get up there.”

“But-”

“Uh-uh. No pressure, remember? Why don’t you two go up?” Ella grinned. “Theatre kids unite and all?”

“I was a child actor, not a ‘theatre kid’,” Chloe said dryly, “It’s a lot less fun. Besides, I just had my turn…”

Ella shrugged. “Eh, the turn system’s more of a guideline anyway. _I_ need at least two more pinas and a mojito before I’m getting up on that stage.”

Chloe rolled her eyes, but looked over at Sabrina. “D’you want me to-?”

“Sure.” Sabrina grinned. “I’ll just...go get that iced tea thing.”

Sadly, she had not yet figured out how to use the ‘what do you desire’ trick, and it was rather less effective coming from a sixteen-year-old girl without Lucifer’s vast network of favours. Even more sadly, that meant she was stuck actually ordering iced tea.

But, by the time she got back to the table, Maze and Linda were back, a group of four drunken young men was up on the stage, and Ella was midway through another story about a prank war between her and her brothers that had apparently snowballed out of all control and ended with one of them getting caught on camera, stark naked, in a churchyard, carrying two very bloody live pigeons and trailed by two black cats.

“-Abuelita was _not_ pleased. We were lucky not to be banned from Mass for the rest of our lives, and Father Landry kept giving us disapproving looks the rest of the time I was living in Detroit, but it was _worth it_ to see those pictures.” 

“Where’d the cats come from?” Sabrina asked, leaning forwards.

Ella shrugged. “I think they belonged to one of our neighbours? But the whole block fed and petted them, they were just...everywhere, y’know?”

“Oh, cool. It...wasn’t really like that in Greendale. I mean, I had Salem, and my aunts had their...uh...pets. Aunt Zelda’s got a dog, Vinegar Tom, and Aunt Hilda keeps spiders…”

Linda gave an odd little shudder at that, and Sabrina shrugged a half-apology.

“Mom had a cat, when I was growing up,” Chloe volunteered. “It never seemed to like me that much, though.”

“I had a budgie for a while.” Linda grimaced. “I should not have been given a budgie.”

Ella looked around. “...wow, that got heavy for a second there. Oh- Hey, you’re up!” She lightly shoved Sabrina’s shoulder. “Go get ‘em, tiger. Tigers. I am just going to stay here with this mojito until it’s my turn.”

“You know you’re allowed to bring other people up with you too, right?” Sabrina asked, frowning at her.

Ella pointed a finger at her. “You. You I like. Okay, I’ll go up if the whole gang goes up with me, but first, I have it on good authority you’re a choir kid, so...time to show off, Rachel Satan-Berry.”

Sabrina would never understand why that comment made Chloe break down cackling so hard that she was just barely recovering by the time they got up onstage and Sabrina was picking out a song. Irritatingly, she didn’t know most of the selections. Greendale always seemed to be the last to know about anything, and music was no exception. She picked a song at random, in the end, just because she liked the title, and looked over at Chloe.

“Um...do we…”

“Just start when the lyrics do,” Chloe said, putting a hand on Sabrina’s shoulder again, to steady her. “You’ve got this.”

Sabrina was painfully aware of being the soberest person in the room, but...well, singing in front of an audience was nothing new, and it’d be a pity not to give them a show after all that effort.

It was surprisingly easy to get into it, once the music started, and belting out that this was her fight song for a drunken crowd was a heaven of a lot less stressful than Kim in _Bye Bye Birdie_ or Lilith in the passion play had been. At some point, Chloe slung an arm around her shoulder to lean in to the mike. It felt very warm, and very new, and it made Sabrina think of Aunt Hilda doing the same as they sang carols for a holiday they didn’t even really celebrate, for no reason she could properly explain to herself.

It was easier yet as the last few chords rolled out, and Chloe’s voice dropped out, leaving Sabrina to finish the song alone.

“-no, I’ve still got a lot of fight left in me!”

Sabrina was beaming by the time she set the mike down on the stand, Chloe’s arm still around her shoulders before they disentangled to head down the stairs and hand off the microphone to a waiting bachelorette party.

The shortest of the party, the one in the tiara - probably the lucky or unlucky bride-to-be - grinned at them as they came down the stairs.

“You’re really good!” she said, eyes shining, “You and your mom do this a lot?”

Sabrina blinked. She looked back at Chloe, and then at the bride-to-be, and realisation hit her like a freight train.

“What- Oh, no, she’s not my mom. We’re just- Uh.”

“Friend of the family,” Chloe supplied, sounding every bit as awkward as Sabrina felt, so at least she wasn’t alone in this. “We should get back to the others,” she added, and then, “Good luck,” apparently just to be polite.

Sabrina could tell by the time they got back to the others that that wasn’t the end of the conversation and, true to form, as soon as they were back at the table, Chloe cleared her throat to ask.

“So...you talk a lot about your aunts and your cousin, but I’ve never heard anything about your mom. You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to, but…”

“It’s…” Sabrina shook her head. “Mom’s dead. She and my dad- Edward Spellman, I mean, not...it’s confusing when you’ve got two of them but not at the same time, because there’s no way to figure out which of them gets ‘dad’ and which one has to figure something else out. But...yeah. They died. Plane crash, when I was a baby.”

She looked down at the table, not wanting sympathy.

“I don’t really remember anything about them. I mean...Dad- Edward- He was our High Priest, so I heard a lot about him. Mom...Nobody in the Church of Night talked about her as much, unless they wanted to make an issue of it.”

“Well, that sucks,” Ella said, in a reassuringly normal tone of voice. “Not big on the Satanism thing, was she? Or- Was there some other reason your church wasn’t keen?”

Sabrina shook her head. “She was Catholic. You should’ve _seen_ the fuss when Father Blackwood found out she’d had me baptised without telling Dad about it.”

Ella winced. “Yeah, interfaith things are always tough. You should’ve seen Abuelita’s face when Jay brought home a Protestant girl one year.”

Maze was frowning. “You want me to kill them for giving you shit?” she asked.

Sabrina shook her head, and took another sip of her tea. It wasn’t half bad, actually. Definitely better than over-sweet mocktails. “Most of them are dead anyway.”

She could _feel_ Ella and Chloe looking at her in concern, and took another gulp of tea.

“Didn’t your aunts tell you anything?” Linda asked, tilting her head to look Sabrina in the face.

Sabrina shrugged. “Bits and pieces. It’s not...I’m not...I do miss them. But I had my aunties and Ambrose. I haven’t exactly been starving for maternal affection.”

“But that’s not the same thing as being unaffected,” Linda said gently. It was her therapist-voice, and Sabrina tried and failed not to bristle at the gentleness of it. “You lost both parents at an early age, and it’s all right to mourn that you never got to have a real relationship with them, even if...other relatives...have subsequently come to light.”

Sabrina sighed. “I had a necromantic seance with her once?” she offered. “She seemed...I mean, she’s my mom, of course _I_ thought she was nice,” she added hastily, making Maze snort and roll her eyes and mutter something uncomplimentary. “But- She wanted me to be happy. Loved and protected, the way she’d have done it if she were alive. I don’t think she’d have agreed to-” she broke off.

It wasn’t relevant what Diana Spellman would have agreed to, because Baphomet had never been real, and Lucifer would never have asked her for any such thing.

Chloe was wearing her ‘I’m not sure if this is an elaborate lie or the Spellman-Morningstars have some sort of hereditary tendency towards delusional fantasies’ face again, but Ella was nodding.

“Seances! Right! I never really tried one of those. I mean, occasionally my friends and me would play Bloody Mary or something at a sleepover, but…never a full-blown seance. Not that anything would happen if we did,” she added hastily.

Sabrina raised an eyebrow. “You don’t believe in ghosts?” she said innocently.

Ella went wide-eyed and nervy at that - interesting - and shrugged with affected casualness. “Not really. I mean, I don’t disbelieve or anything, and I’m not saying I’d say ghosts weren’t real if there was one right in front of me or something like that, but...I mean...if they are, I haven’t seen ‘em, so…”

“Aren’t you all about the faith thing, though?” Sabrina asked. “I mean...what is that, if not belief in something you can’t possibly prove?”

Ella shrugged. “Maybe, but that’s...faith is for the big things. The things that matter. You can’t go around having faith in any old thing that happens by, or it’s not...it doesn’t mean as much.”

The big things. What was big enough? Sabrina had been brought up to have faith in the Dark Lord, and that one had never worked out too well for her. Until recently, anyway. But that had just been an extension of another sort of faith. In Aunt Hilda and Aunt Zelda, in Ambrose, in Harvey and Roz and Theo, even when they’d let her down. And that was expanding too, day by day, because now it meant Trixie, meant Chloe, meant Linda, meant Maze, meant Ella. Meant...tribe, she supposed. Something bigger than family, smaller than coven, but maybe big enough to put her faith in.

“I can see that,” she said, and was surprised to find it was true, and looked around at the stage, where the bachelorette party was finishing up. “It’s your turn. Safety in numbers, right?”

“The true meaning of tribe,” Ella agreed. “All right, ladies, I’m not doing this alone. Qapla’!”


	8. In Which Reese Getty Faces The Apocalypse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not altogether happy with this one, and it's shorter than I'd prefer, but I wanted to get one last bit of fic out before the new season of Sabrina starts, and Reese Getty's stalkery nature made this an interesting concept for me. Consider this a stopgap/foreshadowing for larger events coming up.

Reese hadn’t expected the girl.

To be fair, there was very little in this mess he  _ had  _ expected. The Devil was alive and walking the streets of LA, and there was no information anywhere about what you were supposed to do about that.

Even so, the girl, Sabrina Morningstar or Spellman or  _ whatever  _ she called herself, came as a surprise.

It hadn’t actually been hard to track Lucifer’s whereabouts after the end of the Carlisle case. Reese had told his editor he had a story out of town, and discreetly tailed the Devil all the way to Vegas. He hadn’t actually needed to be discreet, was the worst of it. Lucifer Morningstar’s self-absorption might not be quite as complete as Reese had once thought it was, but he hardly looked in the mirror all the way from California to Nevada. It was almost insulting, after all that effort, to find he really needn’t have bothered.

Tailing Lucifer through Vegas had been harder work, since the Devil was the highest of high rollers, and Reese’s finances weren’t what they had been. It really hadn’t been his fault at all when he lost track of Lucifer entirely, a week in. His Corvette had still been parked at the Wynn, his room booked through the rest of the month, and while Reese wouldn’t put it past Lucifer to sleep in a different bed every night he was in Vegas, presumably he’d have to come back sometimes just for fresh clothes, since Reese couldn’t picture Lucifer wearing the same suit even two days running.

There was an obvious conclusion to be drawn here. The Devil had returned to Hell. Maybe permanently. Maybe only for a little while. Reese didn’t know, and he couldn’t find out. 

Then, three days after Lucifer disappeared, a tow truck arrived for the Corvette, the rest of the hotel reservation was cancelled, and Reese followed Lucifer’s car back to Los Angeles with no story to present to his editor and no more idea of what was going on than he’d had when Lucifer first left LA.

Detective Decker had nearly died, and Lucifer had saved her life. That much information, he’d managed to get out of one of his contacts at the LAPD. Was that why he’d left? He’d been cheated of her soul at the last moment? Except, if that was the reason, why had Lucifer gone out of his way to save her life?

Maybe she wasn’t his yet. Nothing in any of the records on Chloe Decker suggested she was anything but an honest cop, even when it had got her nothing but trouble. There was the  _ Hot Tub High School  _ thing, but if you could be condemned to Hell for one adolescent bad decision, the Devil would hardly need to lift a finger.

Whatever the reason, the Devil had an interest in Chloe Decker, just like he had in Linda, and Reese couldn’t imagine it was going to end well for either one of them. And even if Linda really didn’t love him anymore, even if she was letting herself be seduced by glamour and good looks and a man with the world at his fingertips...he had to believe he could convince her of what Lucifer really was, how shallow all of that had been, how  _ meaningless _ , next to what they’d shared. All Lucifer wanted was to drag her down with him, and maybe sex was just the most convenient way of doing it. The Devil never forced you into anything. He just chipped away at you, over time, slowly eroding your moral qualms and convictions until you turned around and found yourself in his power. Reese  _ loved  _ Linda. And he wanted her back, and safe, and happy. And the only way for any of that to happen was to get the Devil out of her life.

None of this became any less confusing when Lucifer popped back up at LAX, on a flight from  _ Boston  _ of all places, and in the company of a teenage girl he’d proceeded to show off to half of LA as his long-lost daughter.

A little more digging had turned up more information.

Sabrina Spellman, born on the thirty-first of October in the year 2000 to Edward and Diana Spellman in Greendale, Massachusetts. Parents died in a plane crash before she was a year old, on Flight 2331 from Boston to Rome, Sabrina’s guardianship passed to her legal father’s sisters, Hildegard and Zelda Spellman. She was also something like a third or fourth cousin to scandal-prone starlet Montgomery Spellman, which had the vultures pricking up their ears even more than her connection to Lucifer. According to Reese’s LAPD contact, Lucifer was claiming he’d had a threesome with the Spellmans in the right timeframe, and then learnt about Sabrina while he was out of town. Hell, Reese’s contact was pretty sure that had been why Lucifer left LA in the first place, and he knew for a fact that  _ that  _ wasn’t true.

If he was telling the truth about the rest of it, though - and for the Father of Lies, that was a very big ‘if’, but Reese couldn’t think of any reason Lucifer would choose to lie about this - that made Sabrina Spellman the Antichrist.

Reese had never been religious, though he’d done a lot more research on the subject since he saw the Devil in a police interrogation room, but he knew enough to know what that meant.

The end of the world was coming.  _ That  _ was what Lucifer was doing here.  _ That  _ was why he was free.

Unfortunately, that was about all the various sources Reese could find agreed on. The Roman Catholic church forbade priests from preaching about or speculating on a specific date for the coming of the Antichrist, though there was some writing from the fifties that speculated that the Antichrist would first appear as a great humanitarian, who ‘ will talk peace, prosperity and plenty not as means to lead us to God, but as ends in themselves’, which put every politician in the world out there as a candidate. The Mormons seemed to use the term ‘Antichrist’ for anything set up in open opposition to Christ. Most modern evangelical sets had an equally broad definition, or a few particular targets that they’d slap the Antichrist label on. 

Not one of them suggested that the Antichrist might be a sweet-faced teenage girl living with her dad in LA, where the Devil solved murders and Reese’s wife was apparently their family therapist.

_ That  _ had been another unwelcome discovery.

Linda had started treating Spellman just a couple days after she arrived in LA. What for, Reese didn’t know. There was nothing he could dig up online to suggest any sort of trouble back in Greendale, though his editor had denied him permission to go up to Massachusetts and do some digging there for himself, after Nevada. Reese had a lot of contacts, but not in New England, and not in small towns nobody who didn’t live there had ever heard of. Being the Antichrist was probably the sort of thing that required at least some therapy, but Linda wouldn’t be party to something like that. Which just made it all the more worrying, how deep she already was. 

Between Doctor Canaan, Lucifer himself and now Sabrina Spellman, more and more of Linda’s life was getting taken over by this. Reese had charted it happening to Detective Decker, who hardly had anything in her life now that Lucifer hadn’t touched, and now it was happening to Linda, because Reese hadn’t yet managed to gather enough proof to  _ show  _ her what it was she was dealing with.

Thankfully, there was no need to tail Sabrina Spellman in person - even if Reese had never thought much of the paparazzi, it was useful to have one or two of the bottom-feeders who owed you a favour. And if they were going to be following the kid around anyway, they might as well collect two paychecks for it instead of one. Truthfully, Reese was scraping to afford those payoffs. Even now he was all but living out of his office, barely eating, barely sleeping, with nothing else, no-one else to spend his salary on, these things cost, especially since he’d been spending more on booze these past few months than he probably should’ve been.

Depressingly, though, none of the scandal-hounds had been able to turn up much. In desperation, Reese had tagged along one time, hoping nobody who knew his more reputable work would recognise him. They’d followed Sabrina Spellman from her father’s club to a session with Linda, through a day of wandering through half the tourist hotspots in LA, and back to Lux in the evening. Reese hadn’t gone back to the club itself - Lucifer had noticed him the first time he came there, and he wasn’t going to risk it happening again, not yet, not until he was ready - but if there was anything going on in there, if they were plotting out the end of the world together, there was no way he could get close enough to find out about it without being seen.

All of Reese’s sources were quite clear that the Antichrist would be an  _ adult  _ when the time came. It made sense. You couldn’t present yourself as a great humanitarian or preach prosperity and peace as a teenager whose greatest interaction with the media was a handful of petty adolescent scandals. If the Antichrist died while still a teenager...it might not happen. The world might go on, the Devil thwarted. Even if all it meant was that Lucifer had to start again from scratch, that would still buy them another eighteen, twenty years, maybe more, and this time around, he and Linda wouldn’t be at ground zero.

Except-

If he killed Linda’s teenage patient. If he  _ could  _ kill Linda’s teenage patient that she didn’t have any idea was really the Antichrist on Earth...she wouldn’t understand. She’d hate him. She’d never forgive him.

He needed to prove it to her, needed to make it clear what she was really dealing with, and then they could deal with it together. With Linda by his side, Reese had always felt like he could take on the end of the world and win. And maybe, once she knew, once she understood, she’d understand that he really had loved her, all along, even when his job got in the way and they’d barely talked at all.

Which left Reese back at square one, with even less evidence to show for it.


	9. In Which A Beautiful Friendship Is Begun

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For Zapiarty, who asked for Sabrina meeting Ella.  
> This is a bit unpolished, but it's going to have to do, since currently I hate the sight of it and I need to get back into the swing of writing.

Honestly, Ella had sort of concluded that Lucifer was gone for good.

It hurt, but- Truthfully, she couldn’t be that surprised. Probably whatever role he’d been preparing for had finally come up, and the next time they met, he’d be using whatever his actual name was, before he’d invested in this very elaborate roleplay. She’d done some research early on - because if Lucifer was making enough to sustain this whole performance in showbiz, she really ought to have heard of him or seen his face _somewhere_ before all this - but she’d turned up nothing. Lucifer Morningstar had just popped into existence five years ago, started performing, and never stopped.

She’d sort of assumed that this meant it was over. Lucifer was done with this persona, and now he was moving on to adopt a new one, wherever he was now. Kind of a dick move, to abandon them all like that, without even telling them where to find him now the performance had run its course, but...well. Method actors were, as a rule, dicks. Nobody ever channelled a character by being super nice to everyone. She’d half-forgotten that, making friends with Lucifer. Served her right, she supposed, except that that would imply the same thing about Chloe, and if anyone even implied Chloe deserved to be ratted out on like this, she’d have to kick them in the shins on principle. She _wanted_ to kick Lucifer too, when she wasn’t sad that he was gone, and even sometimes when she was. She wanted more for Chloe to be happy again, though, or for her to at least admit she was upset. She was, obviously, but she’d been pretending not to be ever since they all found out that Lucifer was actually gone and not coming back, and nothing Ella could do could nudge Chloe into letting it all out where Ella and Maze and Linda could all try and make it better for her. This was what Tribe was _for_ , as much as anything, and Chloe wasn’t letting them help.

Instead, she was in the lab, trying to puzzle out what looked like a case of murder by musical instrument. She was trying to figure out whether beating a musician to death with a guitar was actual irony or just the Alanis Morisette kind when she heard footsteps behind her, two sets, too light for Chloe’s or Dan’s or anyone else around the precinct except-

“Miss Lopez!”

“Oh my god! Lucifer, what-?” Ella wheeled, which did not improve her understanding of the situation one iota and, if anything, made it worse.

It was Lucifer, standing there in a new suit that didn’t seem to fit him quite as beautifully as any of the others she’d seen him in, standing there as if he’d never been gone at all, and for a moment, Ella just gaped at him before her eyes fell on the teenage girl standing half-behind him, watching Ella with curious, _familiar_ big brown eyes.

It felt a bit like having the feet swept out from under her by a wave, and sitting up only to get a faceful of seawater before she could get her bearings.

“...Lucifer, that’s a kid.”

Lucifer smiled - not one of his usual repertoire, but a new look, that made Ella wonder if he’d sustained any head injuries she didn’t know about between disappearing off the face of the earth two weeks ago and popping up again in her lab with a teenager in tow.

“Yes, she is,” he agreed. “I should probably talk to the Detective about that - where is she?”

“Uh- Downstairs, just got back from a crime scene, but- Wait! You can’t just run off again! You’ve got a lot of explaining to do, starting with- Who’s the kid?”

She had about a hundred more questions, but that was the big one. Who was the kid, what was she doing with Lucifer, and why was she doing it? It probably had something to do with why he’d disappeared for two weeks, just as Chloe was getting out of hospital, but Ella couldn’t begin to guess at what. Some kind of relative, she was guessing- Well, hoping. The eyes might look familiar, but lots of people had brown eyes, and she didn’t _think_ Lucifer would kidnap a kid, but she couldn’t think of that many other explanations. Maybe someone had shoved one on him as part of a deal, like a backwards Rumpelstiltskin, and now Lucifer was trying to figure out what to do with her.

“‘The kid’ is getting sick of people asking that like she isn’t here,” the kid said, crossing her arms. “My name’s Sabrina. Spellman. You’re...Ella, right? Ella Lopez?”

“That’s me!” Ella smiled at her, because why not, after all, and she seemed like an all right kid. “Nice to meet you, Sabrina. So, what _are_ you doing here?”

Sabrina shrugged, shifting her bag from one hand to the other. “I...guess I’m staying? Just for the summer,” she added quickly, “I, uh...I got into a bit of trouble at home, so Dad thought-”

“Dad!?” Ella’s head snapped around to stare at Lucifer. “Wait. Wait, wait. You...You have a _family_ ? Other than...whatever you and Maze are to each other, I mean? You…have you had- I mean, of course you’ve had a kid this whole time, she didn’t just spring out of a hole in the ground, but-” she flailed, unable to find the words, because what the _actual_ fuck?

Lucifer was...not a kid-friendly person. Or he said he wasn’t, anyway. He got on well enough with Trixie that Ella had her doubts about that, but ‘secret other family’ wasn’t something she’d ever have pegged him for. ‘Lucifer’ and ‘someone’s dad’ were...two very distinct categories, and putting them together was just...weird.

“Sabrina’s a...recent acquisition,” Lucifer said awkwardly - _actually_ awkwardly, he even seemed _self-conscious_ , which was new in Ella’s experience - shifting slightly.   
Sabrina snorted. “You didn’t _buy_ me,” she muttered, crossing her arms and setting her chin and, okay, _now_ Ella saw the resemblance. “I’m here because _I_ want to be.”

“Is this…” Ella looked from Lucifer to Sabrina and back again. “Is _this_ why you disappeared on us?”

If so, that was...actually a pretty solid reason. Family emergency and all. Still, he could’ve _called_ at some point, let them all know he was still alive and coming back in the end.

“No.” Lucifer did not seem inclined to elaborate. Ella glared at him.

“So, why did you?”

Lucifer pretended not to hear her. “Anyway. Since parenting experience is one of the few qualities I lack, I thought I’d ask the Detective for her advice-”

“...probably a good idea,” Ella allowed. “But- Wait, how’d you find out about this anyway?”

“Prophecy,” Lucifer said vaguely, which wasn’t much of an answer and- really, wasn’t something like this important enough to break character over?

Then again, people nearly dying was important enough to break character over, and Lucifer never had before. Ella looked at Sabrina, who shrugged.

“...that’s...more or less it,” she admitted. “He actually _fainted_ when Aunt Hilda figured it out.”

Ella grinned. “Did he really?”

“I may have briefly - _very_ briefly - lost consciousness,” Lucifer said, a bit too quickly. Ella could’ve sworn his ears had gone faintly pink.

“You swooned like a Victorian maiden in a too-tight corset,” Sabrina shot back, completely flat except for the way her mouth tugged up at one corner. “I mean, I get why,” she added quickly. “And, I mean, you’re a definite step up from the- from. You know. Him.”

...okay. Did Ella want to poke at that?

“I should hope so!” Lucifer huffed, the picture of offended dignity, and- something else that shaded a bit too close to _worry_. Now that Ella looked closer, there were shadows under his eyes, and something about his usual brightness seemed maybe, just the slightest bit more affected than normal.

She half wanted to ask, but of course if she did, Lucifer would only come up with another story to tie into his whole persona. He was dedicated as- well, Hell, and usually that was great, that was interesting, but right now...not so much. Because clearly something really important had happened, and it sounded like the sort of thing his friends needed to know about.

“So,” she said awkwardly, trying to steer this conversation onto safer ground, “What kinda trouble are we talking about here?”

“The apocalypse.” Sabrina’s voice was so flatly nonchalant that it took Ella a moment to figure out what she’d said. “Also creating a murderous clone of myself and finding out my favourite teacher had been possessed by a demon.”

Ella stared. Blinked. Looked around at Lucifer, who...wasn’t smirking. There was a little furrow between his eyebrows, and his jaw was tight and tense. A thread of unease flickered in the back of her mind.

“...you’re bringing your kid in on the method-acting thing?” she asked, trying to ignore that thread. “I mean...isn’t that…”  
Sabrina’s smirk looked a little like her dad’s, only- harder. Sharper around the edges, all her teeth showing.

“Who’s acting?” she said, smirk widening. “I’m the Antichrist. And also a witch.”

Ella thought back to her own adolescent ‘occult’ phase, and almost groaned. Okay, hers had been reinforced by having an actual ghost hanging around, but she wasn’t sure whether or not all that spooky stuff was as much encouragement to go full-on _weird_ as Lucifer was, all on his own.

“...okay,” she managed. “You do you, kid.” She tried to catch Lucifer’s eye, to see if he was going to give her some indication about just what had actually gone down - because something must’ve, Lucifer was never serious without some solid reason to be - but he was still watching Sabrina with an odd look on his face between wonder and terror that Ella had no trouble whatsoever reading. Huh. Dad shock was a weird look on Lucifer, but he was taking it better than some of the guys she’d known.

“Anyway,” Lucifer said quickly. “I have a few questions I need to ask the Detective, so if you could…” he looked around, a little desperately. “...explain the forensics side of this murder to Sabrina…”

“Oh, I’m getting to join in on the murders now?” Sabrina asked, looking around and raising an eyebrow at him. “Or is this just a ‘know what evidence not to leave next time’ thing?”

Okay, that ‘next time’ was pretty worrying. But then, Ella had got into forensics almost the same way, when she’d still been stealing cars with Ricardo and Rae-Rae had whined at her about getting them into trouble, which was freaking _hilarious_ from a _ghost_ who couldn’t get arrested anyway.

“Uh…sure,” she said, because it wasn’t as if she didn’t like talking forensics, and if Lucifer was going to explain himself to Chloe maybe there was a chance of going back to normal, or something like it. Maybe even something better, now she knew that Lucifer hadn’t just run off on a whim or gotten scared of commitment at the last moment. “I mean, I can’t tell her about _this_ case, because A, I only just got it and B, that is _super_ illegal, but general forensics stuff, sure…”

“You’re really sure it’s a good idea for _me_ to know how to get away with murder?” Sabrina asked, giving her father another pointed look. Oh, great. The edgy phase. Ella remembered that one too. She still, occasionally, thought wistfully about the rose tattoo she’d eventually chickened out of getting. So this was what it had looked like from the outside.

“No, this is where I explain to you why you won’t get away with murder,” Ella cut in. “Not for anything. Not asshole ex-boyfriends, annoying siblings - uh, do you have any-”

“Only child...so far as I know,” Sabrina’s eyes wandered over to Lucifer.

He grimaced. “I don’t exactly make a habit of being easily summonable, hellspawn. And if anyone else dug up that ritual, I haven’t found out about it.”  
“You didn’t find out about _this_ time until you came to Greendale,” Sabrina sulked, crossing her arms.

“I’m quite sure I’d have noticed if anyone _else_ started causing apocalypses-”

Lucifer paused. For a moment, he looked almost confused, or as if he was struggling to remember something that was just on the tip of his tongue.

“...okay, no siblings.” Ella nodded, before they could give her anything else to try and decode or figure out how much was improv performance and how much was metaphor for actual events. “Good decision. I mean, I love my brothers, but apart from Jay, they are…” she whistled. “But I am not allowed to murder them either because that would be wrong. And also I would get caught. Because of the wonders of forensic science. Yes.”

“I’ve got a cousin?” Sabrina offered. “Who I...basically grew up with, so sort of the same thing? He’s a lot older, but...still the nearest thing I’ve got. And both of my ex-boyfriends are...complicated, but I wouldn’t say murder-worthy…”

“I would!” Lucifer protested. “I mean, Nick is less personally objectionable but also behaved worse towards you, and as for Harry-”

“Harvey,” Sabrina corrected. “And- Look, do we have to drag this all out here? I thought I was going to find out how to get away with...mild-to-moderate maiming? Do you do the autopsies too or is that just in cop shows?” she added, looking around at Ella. “My family are all mortificans, so we do a lot of that sort of thing - small town, you know, no coroner…”

Ella blinked. “What- Uh, no. I don’t do those. I mean, I do the preliminary stuff at the crime scenes, but we’ve got our own morgue techs here for the internal stuff. I mostly do crime scene analysis - you know, fingerprints, fibres, blood spatter, all that good stuff.”

“I’ll just leave you to it, shall I?” Lucifer asked nobody in particular, and didn’t wait for an answer before disappearing out the door in search, probably, of Chloe.

Ella looked at Sabrina. “So, I’m waiting on some test results, but...anything you always wanted to ask about forensics?”

Sabrina paused. She looked as if she was pondering something, that little divot between her eyebrows deepening as she thought. 

“So...this stuff’s infallible?” she asked. “There’s no chance of, say...someone getting away with...with shooting someone, say, and making it look like...I don’t know, like they did it to themselves?”

Okay. _That_ wasn’t a shady question at all.

“I’m writing a short story,” Sabrina added, not especially convincingly. “For school.”

 _What_ school? If she’d only just got to LA, she could hardly already be enrolled anywhere, could she? And Ella would’ve heard if Lucifer came back before this. Apparently Sabrina didn’t share her father’s aversion to lies, even if she wasn’t all that good at telling them.

“...I wouldn’t go that far,” Ella said slowly. “I mean, I do my best, but I’m not saying we never get false positives, and an unscrupulous tech can manipulate the evidence. But...with some crimes, it’s easier than others. I mean, this hypothetical shooting, we’d look at the angle of fire - we can figure out bullet trajectory pretty easily, it’s not like in that stupid movie where you can curve a bullet around your head or anything. Then there are things like fingerprints on the weapon itself, powder burns…”

Sabrina nodded, her jaw shifting uneasily. “And, uh, how long after-”

There was a loud _meow_ from Sabrina’s bag. They both looked ‘round. Sabrina’s face slackened for a moment, before screwing up again in obvious guilt.

“ _Salem_ ,” she muttered, “He’s never been cooped up this long before.”

Ella stared as Sabrina set down her bag and opened up the front flap to reach inside. Oh- Okay. That was one fancy cat-carrier. But, now she looked, it was obviously a cat-carrier, even with sections that folded out to give kitty extra space and panels of dark mesh so he could see out. But, more importantly.

“So...you can’t let him out in here,” she said awkwardly. “Lab...supposed to be a sterile environment and all. But...y’know, if you lay it out on the floor, maybe fold all these out…” she tugged on one corner of the carrier, which folded out a little wider. “Is he okay with being petted, or…”

“What- Oh. Yeah. I’m pretty sure he won’t take your fingers off unless I ask nicely, so…”

Sabrina knelt down to open up the front panel and reached one cautious hand inside. There was a soft hiss from inside.

Sabrina rolled her eyes. “I _said_ I was sorry, Salem! What, would you rather have stayed behind in Greendale?”

Another meow.

“You could’ve told me that _before_ we got on the plane.”

A low and sulky noise, not quite a mew, emanated from the depths of the cat-carrier.

It really did sound like a conversation, Ella thought. Then again. She talked to ghosts. Sabrina talked to cats. Maybe it was one.

She glanced at the test results - still not complete, and she’d done all the other tests on this crime-scene, so...there was really no harm in plopping herself down next to Sabrina and holding out a hand, just outside the opening of the cat-carrier, for Salem to sniff.

Salem, as it turned out, was a friendly black shorthair and, according to Sabrina, a fiend from Hell. So, pretty on-brand for the Morningstars. Of which there was now more than one. Yeah, that thought wasn’t getting any less weird with time.

“So,” she said cautiously, glancing sideways at Sabrina as she scritched behind Salem’s ears. “Apocalypse, huh. That must’ve been pretty rough.”

This was the point where most teenagers would’ve snorted and said, yeah, they made that up, this whole performance thing was their dad’s idea, and they didn’t need to be talked down to about it by Ella.

Sabrina coughed and looked away. “I...uh. Yeah. Does...does he really just...talk like this all the time?”

“Never seen him break character yet,” Ella admitted. “It’s...pretty weird at first, but since you were joining in I figured…”

“I’m not...not _crazy_ ,” Sabrina said quickly. 

Ella’s heart twisted in her chest. “‘Course you’re not,” she agreed. “So...uh...how long’ve you had this little guy?”

“Since a bit before my birthday.” Sabrina smiled at her cat, though there was still something wary in the look she shot at Ella. “He, uh...he was a stray in the woods outside my aunts’ place, so…he sort of followed me home.”

“Your aunts. That’s who you live with? Or…”

Ella was starting, she thought, to get a feel for exactly what sort of ‘trouble back home’ Sabrina had gotten into. Maybe the same sort Ella got into, when she wasn’t much younger than Sabrina. About when having an imaginary friend had stopped being ‘cute’ and started being ‘a serious psychological warning sign’.

“Yeah. Aunt Hilda and Aunt Zelda. And Ambrose.”

“Your mom’s family?” Ella guessed - not much of one, if Lucifer had only just found out about the kid.

Sabrina shifted. “...no.”

...okay, maybe that hadn’t been quite as safe a question as Ella had thought. The tight set of Sabrina’s jaw and shoulders said pressing any further might not be a good idea, so Ella changed gears.

“Y’know, I had a pretty rough time in high school too. People said I was crazy...all the time, so...I get it.”

“Yeah?” Sabrina’s brown eyes were flat and hard and gave nothing away.

“Yeah. I mean...I hope I do? I just- Whatever it is, it _cannot_ be worse than some of the things I got up to at your age. Trust me.”

Sabrina made a noise at that that might’ve been a laugh or a strangled sob. “I...really doubt that.”

“You’d be surprised.” Ella put up her hands - well, one of them. The other was still occupied scritching Salem under the chin. “Point is - you don’t have to tell me. This is a no-judgement zone. We don’t have to be friends or anything, but...y’know, you seem like a nice kid, and your dad’s a friend of mine, so...I mean, it’s a bit late to claim dibs on being godmother, but…”

Sabrina was very still, watching her. Almost too still, a part of Ella’s brain whispered, but that was the kind of thinking that led her to wondering why Rae-Rae was the only ghost she’d ever seen, if ghosts were really a thing, or why it had felt, in that one moment after the car turned over, like she was somehow weightless, and was thus not to be listened to.

“...I’d like that,” she said after a moment, in an oddly small voice, and looked down at her cat before Ella could gauge her expression. “Would...do you mind watching Salem for a bit?”

Ella frowned. “What- Uh, sure. Bathrooms are just down the hall and on your left,”

“Right...uh, where would I find Detective Decker, exactly?” Sabrina asked, her voice just a shade too innocent.

Ella raised her eyebrows. “Uh...last I heard she was still running up leads on our latest dead guy. Musician. And I don’t have all the test results back yet, but it looks like he was beaten to death with some kind of guitar.”

Sabrina actually _laughed_ at that, low and quick and familiar. “Well, _someone_ definitely had a taste for poetic justice. Was it his guitar, or…?”

“Still not sure about that.” Ella admitted. “But she should be in the bullpen unless they’ve turned up something really promising. Why so keen to see Chloe? Did- Did Lucifer say anything about her? I mean, you knew who I was, so…”

“He might’ve told me a bit.” That hard, challenging look was back on Sabrina’s face. “I guess I just want to find out how true it was. And, I mean, he didn’t _tell_ you to keep me here…”

Ella grinned. “...you want to embarrass your dad, don’t you?”

Sabrina nodded, her smirk twisting into something a little warmer, more mischievous, more...sixteen-year-old, Ella thought, and couldn’t account for it.

And...well. It would serve Lucifer right for not calling any of them for two weeks and sending Chloe into a spiral right after they finally, _finally_ seemed to have gotten their act together.

“Go for it, kid. I never saw you.”

Sabrina’s answering grin showed just a flash of what looked for a moment like fangs.

“You know,” she said. “I think we’re going to like each other.”


End file.
